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Page 8

There

is a great problem emerging from the incompatibility between traditional IT infrastructures and the newest tools that are being ofered to businesses in the form of SOAs (Service-Oriented Architectures). Traditional IT infrastructures are typically not designed in accordance with any far reaching goals or proposed future technological advancements. Additionally, most of these systems also lack scalability and may also possess a user interface that is less than ideal. High maintenance and operating costs are also intimately associated with traditional IT architectures, making them unruly and, in some cases, utterly infexible. When you combine all of this with the fact that a run-of-the-mill traditional IT setup will often feature an exceedingly complex architecture (mostly due to the fact that no long term planning went into its design), you have a system that is literally one step away from being broken.

By contrast, the average SOA is extremely fexible and is usually designed to be able to greatly simplify the underlying structure of a business’s IT department. Why/how is SOA superior in this regard? First of, most Service-Oriented Architecture is designed to be passive; in other words, its interaction with the infrastructure it inhabits is somewhat limited. If SOA were a person, they would be the type that always did their job right and kept to their own business; most SOA is not designed to infuence the function(s) of the larger system.

A highly modularized design is also a staple of most SOAs. This design facet allows them to be quickly restructured for diferent purposes (logic fows) should the need for such a thing arise. Additionally, an SOA exists on top of or around the edges of an IT infrastructure; it can be easily and painlessly “unplugged” from the larger system and repositioned somewhere else without jeopardizing the stability or security of the larger infrastructure.

Modern trends in computing seem to be pushing toward the development of more user customizable infrastructures; whereupon, any knowledgeable IT manager can repurpose any and all existing elements without much efort. This, of course, fies in the face of the traditional IT model, which relies heavily on constant software upgrades, patches, and hardware additions. What makes the concept of SOA infrastructures for cloud computing such an interesting proposition is the possibility of being able to:

• Supercharge your system’s fexibility to perform tasks via SOA modules —If there’s one area where cloud computing soars high above the competition, it would have to be fexibility. When you couple this with the fexibility ofered via modularized Service-Oriented Architectures, you have a match made in heaven.

• Keep your infrastructure neatly organized — Those that have experience in servicing traditional IT infrastructures are aware of the fact that they are often organizational nightmares. This is yet another area where cloud computing is clearly superior; most cloud architectures have to be organized in order to function properly.

• Instantly requisition new computing resources to an SOA in the event that it reaches an overdraft in terms of capacity —Unlike the processes involved in applying additional resources in a traditional IT setup (which cloud computing does automatically via an elastic and highly scalable infrastructure), SOA in the cloud will be able to instantly increase any number of attributes, which will help it retain functionality in the event of high volume/trafc periods of operation.

SOA Infrastructure

VS

Traditional IT Architecture

Brad Andrews