SOA + Utility Computing

As Amazon EC2 exploded onto the IT scene summer 2006 with a beta "by invitation only," we were fortunate to get an account and by August 2006 start pounding on the first practical Utility Computing infrastructure that was more than a bunch of slides and marketing mumbo-jumbo.

Every astute marketing team has at some point used Utility, Grid and Virtualization in their power point slides and brochure-ware. I have been at many conferences and on many calls where I kept hearing such terms but couldn't figure out what all this hoopla was all about, I don't think the presenters knew either ;-) If I can't touch it, I don't understand it. If I can't play with it, it is just vaporware. So, I kept my eye on Grid computing but never really saw a commercial (non-academic) benefit of using grids and utility computing. As much as I am into Astronomy, I couldn't see myself ever using an academic grid to compute the Milky Ways expansion rate or some other esoteric problem.

Finally, Amazon EC2 exploded on the scene with a startling characteristic: a full web services-based provisioning interface. Starting up and terminating Linux instance is as simple as a SOAP call.

This characteristic is the most significant and disruptive aspect of the Amazon EC2 platform. All Hardware and Software product vendors take notice: Your products should be Amazon-aware for true scalability.

So we did what any geek would do, played with the EC2 platform day and night and then published a first paper on EC2: "Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo" on Dr. Dobbs.

A few weeks later, SAP has taken notice. Perhaps it had something to do with the emails that we sent to 40 SAP folks about this concept. A couple of significant announcements/interviews from SAP this week:

InfoWorld: Q&A: SAP chief developer heads 'clouds'
Business Week: Opening Up to Collaboration (interview with Shai Agassi, President SAP Product Development)

We sincerely hope that large vendors such as SAP, Oracle, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft take advantage of platforms like EC2 for both their SaaS offerings as well as making their software components EC2-aware. We believe SOA Testing Tools will have a significant role to play in making SOA components run smoothly on Utility Computing Platform such as EC2.

SOA World Editorial - Getting on the Grid

On Jan 14, 2007, Dr. Dobbs published an article titled Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo that highlights the convergence of SOA and Utility Computing. This article highlights a move towards Hardware as a Service (HaaS) and the merits of dynamically provisioned hardware based on crossing pre-set resource thresholds (CPU, Memory, TCP Connections, etc). Excerpts from this article are as follows:

Web services-based SOA has fundamentally changed how applications integrate. Add on top of that Amazon EC2 to host your business operations, and you get a potent combination. The significant, yet unnoticed breakthrough of Amazon EC2 is in its ability to spawn up a server instance by a mere web-service call. In addition to a command line interface, EC2 provides a detailed provisioning WSDL that can be used by any web-services application to dynamically control (e.g., run, terminate, authorize) Linux instances within the Amazon Cloud.... components which run business applications can also control dynamic provisioning and maintenance of the very physical infrastructure that they are deployed on. With Amazon EC2, for the first time, SOA components are aware of and in control of their host machines and can clone new instances of themselves based on environmental factors such as user load, available resources and cost.

On March 7, 2007, Ajax World Magazine Sean Rhody, Editor-in-Chief of SOA World Magazine, echoed our sentiments with a superb piece, SOA World Editorial — Getting on the Grid. It is always gratifying to see industry luminaries such as Sean see things in the same light. I liked the new term Sean uses, SOI: Service Oriented Infrastructure. Here are some excerpts from the article, it's a must read:

Grid computing, with the ability to bring capacity on line and to bear on a problem as needed provides another stunning opportunity to move from traditional means of operation to a service platform. Bringing CPUs to bear on a problem in a dynamic fashion, assigning additional network capacity to deal with peak loads, and allocating private connections on the fly in response to security needs are just a few of the capabilities that infrastructure vendors are building into their hardware and operating software.

Great minds do think alike - Kudos to Sean for appreciating and writing about the inevitable convergence of SOA & Utility computing and its impact on SOA Testing.

Intro to SOAP Headers in C#

Let's learn how to manipulate SOAP Headers in .NET C# with a simple web service producer-consumer example. .NET Framework SDK provides a sample producer that receives a SOAP Request with Header information, gets a handle on the Header and returns information from the Header as a part of the SOAP Response. To get familiar with manipulating SOAP Headers let's walk you through the steps on loading this in Web Matrix.

1. Get familiar with building simple web services in .NET. See Building and Testing your First Web Service in .NET
2. Download the C# SOAP Header sample from here.
3. Start a web services project in ASP .NET Web Matrix and copy the sample C# SOAP Header code from Step 2 above into the editor. See figure below.
4. Hit the save button and then the start button. This will bring up the browser with the service description. The WSDL file will be available at a location similar to http://localhost:9090/SOAPHeaders.asmx?WSDL (depending on your port setting and .asmx file name in Web Matrix). See Step 1 example.
5. You can now load the WSDL is a SOA Testing Tool that is SOAP Header aware. SOAPSonar is one such flexible SOA Testing Tool that you can download from Crosscheck Networks.
6. Load the WSDL into SOAPSonar. The parsed WSDL shown below has a header and a body inputs. Entering values for the Headers and Body results in a SOAP response from the SecureMethod.
   

Testing SOAP Headers requires test tools to properly parse WSDL and generate input fields for the SOAP Headers. SOAPSonar enables developers and testers to do this easily. With full SOAP Header control, you can now build authentication, routing, audit, and security schemes right into the header. It is strongly advised that standards-based header content is used and customization for header be restricted for maximum interoperability.