Friday 20 March 2009

Cloud computing and SOA

There has been lots of Buzz lately about cloud computing, this is in fact nothing new SUN micro systems declared long ago that network is computer. In Late 90's sun micro systems visioned a day when computing power will be rented. They actively worked on Grid computing and their efforts are paying off in large projects in R&D.


The most popular and successful player in cloud computing space has been Amazon . It provides storage, computing and other features. Meanwhile Microsoft has also jumped on the cloud bandwagon and is in process of releasing cloud computing platform/OS called Microsoft Azure. Since this is cloud platform it will be hosted by Microsoft with pay-as-you go payment plan. The developer hosting applications on Azure platform would be able to communicate using standard protocols HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.


Some have been quick to declare SOA is dead and Cloud computing is in. In fact if we examin cloud computing it is in fact an implementation of SOA. In cloud computing you are exposing Data services and custom business services running on rented infrastructure.

One must not confuse Cloud computing from Utility computing. The later is about providing on-demand infra structure where as cloud computing is about building applications on computing services hosted by cloud provider.







Cloud Computing in Plain English

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