Chapter 3

Service Orientation in the Cloud

In This Chapter

Defining service orientation

Exploring the importance of service orientation in the cloud

Discovering characteristics of service orientation

Understanding the role of cataloging services

Surveying the importance of service orientation to each cloud model

The increasing adoption of hybrid cloud environments can be directly linked to the success enterprises have made in moving to a service-oriented approach to IT. Service orientation is a way to modularize key business services and to establish well-defined interfaces designed to ensure that these services work in many different situations. This move to service orientation has been an evolving process and not an easy one at that. In fact, organizations have worked very hard to separate traditional components of computing so that application code can function independent of the underlying operating system and hardware. This separation is required to develop the modular and repeatable development process that makes service orientation an important prerequisite for the cloud. Of course, not every organization that is using cloud computing has adopted service orientation, but it certainly makes it easier to create a well-functioning cloud if you are planning and managing services. As companies add more and more cloud services, the service-oriented approach becomes a more important underpinning for success.

As organizations begin to manage integrated environments comprised of private and public cloud services along with traditional data center services, service orientation is being viewed as the glue that keeps everything working as intended. In this chapter, we define service orientation and describe its role in cloud computing.