Why Service Orientation Matters in the Cloud

Hybrid cloud environments are becoming important because organizations are constantly reinventing themselves to respond to change and to become more competitive. These organizations recognize that IT must be at the forefront of a business strategy based on innovation and transformation. They also understand that it’s hard to find one IT computing approach that is the best one for all types of workloads. Therefore, the most practical approach is to implement a hybrid cloud environment. (See Chapter 9 for more on the business value of hybrid cloud.)

To make a cloud infrastructure work in the real world requires a high level of flexibility and modularity. A cloud must be designed to support a variety of workloads and business services. No one can anticipate when a service needs to be scaled up and when it will be scaled down. Specifically, it is this service-oriented approach to architectural design that supports the key cloud characteristics of elasticity, self-service provisioning, standards-based interfaces, and pay-as-you-go flexibility. The combination of a service-oriented approach and cloud services enables companies to lower costs and improve business flexibility.

Utilizing reusable and loosely coupled components makes scalability and elasticity a reality for public and private cloud environments. Consider what might happen in a cloud environment if the principles of service orientation aren’t applied. Say, for example, that you’ve built a private cloud that deals with some of your company’s applications and data, but you’re using a public cloud for some other applications. You don’t want these applications to be stove-piped. They need to act together. If there are well-defined interfaces that enable you to share data, for example, among these applications (no matter where they are), you will be well served. If you’re working with vendors where the platform has lots of dependencies that will lock you in, you will not be able to gain the business advantages you expect.

One of the key benefits of a service-oriented approach is that software is designed to reflect best practices and business processes, instead of making the business operate according to the rigid structure of a technical environment. Service orientation lets companies leverage existing assets and create new business services that are consistent, controlled, and more easily changed and managed. As a result, a service-oriented approach leads to business goals consistent with the demands of cloud computing environments. Here are some of the potential benefits:

Improve flexibility of IT

Improve responsiveness

Improve performance

Reduce cost of building and testing software

Improve accuracy

Decrease complexity

Improve customer service

Align with the business

Increase interoperability

Increase federation