Engwar

If you’ve not already heard the term (gasp!) or don’t have an idea about cloud computing you can look no further than the excellent, short presentation titled “Cloud Computing – Why IT matters” by Simon Wardley. Also, read a great paper about the subject “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” [PDF].

Usually in technically adept circles you can hear virtualization being used more often than the term cloud computing, the technology that enable computers to evaporate into small H₂O particles and form clouds. Virtualization tools have been there for a while. It was, IMHO, got popular after Amazon slapped a Web services interface in front of Xen and said, try using this interface to start/stop and manage virtual machines. Having a separate service for persistent storage, again, is a brilliant marketing move. With big investments (such as Intel investing in Joyent) one can guarantee that the cloud space will get cloudier as time progress. This might make projects such as Simple Cloud more attractive.

Adoption rates for cloud computing is going to increase among the big guys. As a survey done by Forrester tells “one out of four large companies plan to use an external provider soon, or have already employed one”. When people are seriously considering moving to cloud platforms, you have to make sure that all the application programs are ready to be run on a virtualized environment. Specially SOA middleware products that the company is using should be compatible and must be able to take advantage of the services provided.

One advantage of moving to cloud computing is the ability to add/remove resources as and when it’s required. If your applications, or middleware products that you’re using is incapable of getting advantage of this elasticity (autoscaling to the inner techie in you) there’s no point, or no value gained by putting your stuff in the cloud. It’s one reason why WSO2 has “cloud enabled” all of the products line. Not only you can host all your services in the cloud using WSO2 middleware products, you can download pre-built images for VMware and KVM to run inside your private virtualized infrastructure. Give it a whirl and see!

SOA Governance by Todd Biske is surprisingly an easy read that explain what is governance and what does it mean in an SOA setting. It begins with a comprehensive introduction to governance and the three main important aspects, people, policies and processes. Then, he explains how to introduce SOA into existing project governance efforts. After describing the core concepts, Todd goes on to explain how most enterprises fall into the trap of creating a bunch of services and calling it SOA. How to approach the problem with defined goals when trying to adopt a service oriented architecture is clearly explained. I found it quite natural and easy to follow they style of the information presented where Todd tries to create a discussion among people in a virtual corporation. I think this makes it easy to relate the problems of a similar, real organization.

The chapter describing the role of governance during the analysis phase of a project was an eye opener for me because I had this wrong impression that SOA governance applied only to the components that is used in a service oriented architecture. This, as I later found out, called run time governance where you monitor the services to ensure they consistently deliver according to the governing policies and metric collection process for each and every service. In the chapter that’s dedicated to run time governance, Todd describe how to define provider/consumer baselines and how to manage them.

After guiding the reader through all the aspects of SOA governance, what should be done and how you should go about doing those, Todd paints a picture of what does it look like when you have implemented all these steps successfully. Then he explains how one can implement SOA governance in his/her organization along with some common challenges that one might face.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this wonderfully well written book about SOA governance. You can read a sample chapter about service versioning here.

Samisa has written a nice post about using PHP in the enterprise. A commenter there argues that he don’t use PHP because it’s a dynamically typed language. It’s somewhat true that if you’re coming from a statically typed language background you’re stormed with so many questions and wonder possible nightmares of using one. Once you start learning a language and understand how programs are suppose to be written in that language most of these problems go away.

For all these years, it has only been Java/.Net programmers who has been enjoying the luxury of service oriented architectures. These folks understand the value of building a business functionality as a service or exposing an existing functionality as a service. PHP programmers have been building their web based programs happily without having to know what services mean. People in the PHP community has tried to bring Web services into the language with varying degrees of success. These are very courages and thoughtful efforts. But if you analyze them objectively you’ll see that many of these libraries doesn’t contain that much of features in order to build/integrate an application with an existing enterprise app.

What WSF/PHP has done is lower the bar of building PHP applications that can fit with existing applications in an enterprise written in Java/.Net or whatever the language that might be. Also, it has enabled ability to integrate existing PHP applications to your other enterprise applications.

One strong reason companies have embraced developing applications in Java is that so their data will not be isolated from rest of the enterprise data. In the past having a PHP application inside your company might have been frowned upon because it doesn’t make sense to have information which is isolated from all the other applications in the company. This is why most organizations invest in an ERP for example. But now, this has become a non issue. If you’re using open standards inside your enterprise to communicate/integrate applications, using WSF/PHP, you can integrate or extend services seamlessly with rest of your enterprise services.