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.