Rising from the ashes!

This is no spiritual awakening post, nor an essay on how to rebuild the world from the economic meltdown.

There are numerous obituaries for SOA in the recent past in the blogosphere with some lamenting on the untimely demise of iconic superstar and pointing fingers towards the economic recession. There have been many discussions on this topic with diverging views starting from clear rebuttal to the acceptance of the fact that hype is over, at least the one created by the vendors !

It is quite natural for things to fail and the rebuilding process to drive for newer things. This keeps the wheel moving. There have been instances where a new idea has been rejected outrightly, only to resurface again after some time or lead to something new and disruptive.

It is a fact that not many IT decision makers are now interested to listen to SOA eulogy and how this can bring transformational change to business aka. business agility. In my view rather than debating on whether SOA is dead or alive, industry should now focus on the learnings and the technologies that can help the industry move forward.

SOA has many off-springs(ex. Cloud Computing, RESTful Services, Mashups etc) that can bring changes to the way IT can deliver value to business. I strongly believe that the focus and evangelism around SOA has helped build distributed solutions with web as the 'common gateway'.

Distributed computing is going through a metamorphosis with many new concepts like Cloud computing, Map Reduce distributed computing, distributed file systems, non-relational distributed databases driving some of the new solutions and offerings. There have been others like multicore computing, functional programming languages and software appliances that are also catching the imagination.

Cloud computing is also going through a similar hype cycle like SOA with many terming it as the next best thing, while others are rejecting it as just another fad. There have been many acronyms and offerings around cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). There have also been private cloud offerings for enterprises by some vendors. Recent McKinsey report has done well to differentiate cloud from cloud services and has some very good observations on its usefulness to an enterprise.

- Many cloud services are confused with cloud.

A true cloud has to comply with three key requirements.

a. It has to abstract the underlying hardware from the buyer

b. Be elastic in scaling to demand

c. Bill buyers on a pay-per-use basis

A cloud service complies with two key requirements.

a. It is a service where the underlying infrastructure is abstracted and can scale elastically

b. It could run on top of a cloud, although it is not required to (e.g., SaaS)

- Cloud offerings are most attractive for small and medium-sized enterprises and not cost-effective for larger enterprises.

- Larger Enterprises can achieve server utilization rate similar to those of cloud providers by focusing on data center best practices ( virtualization, service catalog etc)