Clouds, SOA and Aging

Well, I haven’t quite reached the stage of yelling at kids to get off my lawn – but I might be getting close.

I attended a session at Impact titled: “Delivering Strong Services: SOA to the Cloud” – delivered by Daryl Plummer from Gartner. Was the first time that I’ve had the chance to see Daryl in person and enjoyed his presenting and the ideas he discussed.

If you attended Impact, you can log in and download the slides – look for session 3097 (or search by the title).

I don’t plan on regurgitating the entire presentation, but did want to discuss a couple of ideas that were a part of the session.

The first is the idea of scalability versus elasticity. I’ve seen this discussed in a number of places and presentations related to Cloud solutions. When I see the reference to elasticity I think in terms of being to scale up or down as needed. I.e. the solution is able to stretch to meet the needs related to the current (and changing)workload. So I find it odd to see discussions of cloud where it is mentioned that cloud provides scalability and elasticity – seems redundant to me. Have I misinterpreted the meaning of elasticity?

More specific to the session at Impact, there was a discussion on the idea of Cloud Service Brokerages that provide service intermediation or service aggregation (for example). As I listened to the presentation my thoughts wandered to the idea of an ESB and viewing these brokerages as essentially providing ESB like services to a number of customers. The would be an EESB – an extra-ESB – and following on that line of thinking starting to see myself thinking in terms of inter, intra and extra cloud based solutions and drawing parallels to how we saw focus on internet use and capabilities evolve over the years.

And hence the aging comment – seems that after you’ve spent enough years in IT you start to relate everything back to what you’ve seen previously. So here I am, in my advanced years thinking – this cloud stuff is just repeating the cycle of thinking that we experienced in inter/intra/extra-net roll-outs. Back in my day…

Lee.