Here an article covering SOAPSonar 6.0, the leading SOA Testing product. The latest version provide a number of capabilities including testing cloud providers as well as testing using clouds.
For detailed article, see: SOAPSonar 6.0 from Crosscheck Networks Capable of Testing Unlimited Users in Cloud
The MIT System Design and Management (SDM) summer 2010 business trip kicked off at the Faculty Club with a keynote address on entrepreneurship and leadership by Mamoon Yunus (MIT Mechanical Engineering, 1993 and 1995), President and CEO of Crosscheck Networks.
Yunus, who was introduced by Unatek CTO Charles Iheagwara (SDM 2010) after an opening statement by SDM director Pat Hale, saw a "gap" in the cloud computing movement and in 2004 founded Crosscheck to build technology that would scrub XML traffic in the cloud. Seeing gaps, said Yunus, is key to success.
"You can’t innovate in a vacuum," Yunus said. For example, after speaking at Harvard Business School he was approached by several MBA students who asked him, "‘How does one generate ideas? We know business, but are looking for ideas where we can apply our business skills."
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For CIOs, CTOs and business application architects, cloud computing has become inescapable aspect of their overall IT strategy. As businesses consider approaches to migrating parts of their infrastructure to the cloud, IT organizations wrestle with fundamental questions such as:
SQL Azure provides affordable and rapid collaboration across SOA Test teams using SOAPSonar, the industry leading, comprehensive SOA and Cloud Testing product. This article provides an overview of using a shared repository: SQL Azure for collaborative SOA testing across dispersed SOA Test teams.
SQL Azure is a promising option for corporations that deploy Micrsoft technology and are interested in leveraging cloud computing to reduce IT costs and respond rapidly to business requirements. For companies that are simply looking for hosted relational databases, other options such as MySQL hosted by Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid or OpSource serve as strong alternatives.
Our impressions of SQL Azure have been positive. Through firewall rules, security provisions are adequete and not overwhelming for database and application developers. We do expect a richer web-based management interface in the future that goes beyond just creating an dropping databases. Although SQL Management Studio, installed locally on your machine, provides powerful management capabilities, it dilutes the power of installation-free, cloud-based components.
Corporations can use Quality Assurance and Testing as low-hanging use-cases for cloud computing. Companies should be less concerned about storing test data in external clouds compared to, for example, real customer data. Using SQL Azure for SOA test automation provides better collaboration for test teams, ease of database management and a cheaper alternative to procuring and maintaining on-premise test infrastructure.For complete article, see: http://soa.sys-con.com/node/1379631
In the absence of quantifiable data, enterprises are challenged to make well-informed choices when it comes to migrating to the cloud. Instead, they often find themselves forced to make these strategic decisions based on ad-hoc or partial information. This is a risky and unproductive approach, especially when typical migration process requires moving numerous components -- including databases, application servers, ESBs, identity stores, and BEPL orchestration engines -- to the cloud. Once a full reference system is deployed, the behavior of the enterprise applications interacting with the cloud-based components must be tested -- using customized production code. This is an expensive, time-consuming and potentially error-prone proposition.
With CloudPort, enterprises benefit by never having to touch production code -- while eliminating the substantial time, capital and IT staff resource expenses related to building a distinct cloud test environment.
For further information, see SD Times article:
http://www.sdtimes.com/link/34249
For details on CloudPort, see:
http://www.crosschecknet.com/products/cloudport.php
Extending corporate boundaries to cloud infrastructure providers requires focused review of security practises used to integrate from the enterprise DMZ to external trading partners. Here is an article that covers Enterprise-to-Cloud communications issues and how best to prepare from them. SOA Testing and XML Gateway play an intergral part in ensuring that the security provisions are well tested and strictly enfored while interacting with cloud providers.
Strategies for Securing Enterprise-to-Cloud Communication
— The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) published Version 2.1 of its Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing with a significant and comprehensive set of recommendations that enterprises should incorporate within their security best practices if they are to use cloud computing in a meaningful way. The Guidance provides broad recommendations on operational security concerns including application security, encryption & key management, and identity & access management. In this article, we will consider security implications of REST- and SOAP-based communication between consumers and specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers.
Comprehensive SOA testing, using commercial and mature products such as SOAPSonar from Crosscheck Networks, is critical for companies as they expand beyond their localized SOA domains and integrate with SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers to build a Federated SOA. Here's an article that highlights the relationship between Federated SOA and Cloud Computing.
Federated SOA: A Pre-requisite for Enterprise Cloud Computing
— Successful enterprise SOA implementations build on a set of localized, project-level efforts with services that have clearly identified and accountable business and technology owners. Ownerships defines a SOA Domain. SOA domains may exist within corporate boundaries or may be provided as services by third parties. Deciding what services are core to a business owner and should be implemented within her/his domain versus consumed from another SOA domain becomes a critical part of building Federated SOA. Understanding core capabilities provided by SOA domains is a crucial task at the enterprise-level for encouraging efficiency through re-use and for keeping focus on core business services.
As SOA domains mature, key issues arise in enabling "SOA Domain Jumping," -- easily and rapidly integrating with other SOA domains. Here are the top three Federated SOA requirements that corporations must first address before embarking on a meaningful and sustained cloud computing deployment.
The is article discusses the advantages of using service virtualization whereby, in the simplest case, you may import a number of WSDLs, aggregate them and then expose them via and XML Gateway, such as Forum Sentry, based on the credential presented. The impact of service virtualization on SOA testing is significant:
XML/SOA Testing of XML Security Policies (XML Encryption, XML Signatures) will become the centerpiece of Cloud-based deployments that are multi-tenant in nature and can inadvertently expose corporate information.
MIT Technology Review published an interesting article sumarized under MIT Technolgy Review covers "Swamp Computing"
