Cloud to Cloud Integration

After having hosted a Cloud Computing event in November and hearing how companies are dipping their feet in the cloud, the next logical step we discussed was inter cloud communication. As a small company I may buy into Salesforce.com for CRM, Workday for HR/Financials and Google AppEngine for custom apps. How do I tie these solutions together for data synchronization? What if the data to be exchanged is extremely large? What solutions can I use to do the heavy lifting?

Service Bus solutions either deployed locally or in the cloud provide a composition medium to support such interactions. Cloud platforms expose public APIs via REST or SOAP for near-real time communication.

Large data sets and exchange of this for processing is being investigated by a interesting consortium called Open Cloud Consortium.

Another interesting area may be the creation of middleware in the cloud. Grand Central tried to support this in the early 2000 timeframe. It was a little ahead of its time but now we are seeing Amazon SQS, Microsoft Azure w/Biztalk and other similar platforms.

QCon, Security and Musings

I was fortunate to speak at QCon San Francisco, CA on November 20 discussing Service Security and my own journey on understanding security but more importantly how services can be hacked. It was interesting when examining the audience to see a mixture of participants but the lack of questions was a little disconcerning. I could take three things from that:

1) Everyone in the audience was familiar with service hacking / security.
2) People are not very familiar and were afraid to ask questions or didn't understand the content.
3) People were not interested.

Since the audience stayed for the entire presentation and questions were basic, I think the majority of the audience was in category 2.

With the increasing discussion on Cloud Computing (QCON was loaded with Cloud presentations as was SOA / Cloud Symposium 2.0/1.0) security had very little presence. In understanding security, my own education was due to a client requirement. With just a couple months of effort, I was able to better understand the security technology. The harder part has been in understanding the hacking culture, finding helpful material and approaches and how that impacts services I create. Here is the link to the QCon presentation.

ECAUG 1.0: Architecture User Group

Wednesday this week I hosted a user group in Waltham, MA focusing on Cloud Computing experiences. I was fortunate to have Steve Robbins of Modus21 and Matson Wade representing HKM at the event. In their discussions, they broke down their experiences with Amazon Web Services specifically EC2, S3, SQS and a few other features. If you are interested in participating in the future, let us know. We can extend an invite to the Ning forum that we have setup and you can check out the presentations. A couple of criteria at the moment are you are based in the US and you are willing to proactively participate. No vendors are allowed which in turn provides a more frank and interesting discussion.

SMB not fit for SOA?

During a training class I was leading today, a very interesting question came up which is "All this SOA stuff we have been talking about today is great for a large company but seems to be overkill for the SMB (Small / Medium Business). Since SMB makes up a much larger percentage of the business world then traditional business, why should we care?".

Well one way to look at the problem is that services are permeating the cloud computing space, in fact last week's SOA Symposium co-hosted a Cloud Computer Conference. Cloud computing is becoming a game-changer for SMB in providing a variety of tooling from productivity (documents, email, etc.) to CRM (i.e. Saleforce.com) to HR (i.e. Workday) to Infrastructure (i.e. Amazon/Azure). The one common aspect in these is the ability to interact using service APIs and thus the need for SMB to be adept at service consumption and composition.

Versioning Podcasts

As part of my work with SOA Systems / SOABooks.com, I was asked to support Podcasts on versioning based on my participating with David Orchard (formerly BEA). Check the two podcasts out and fire over some questions if you have any.

Flexible Contracts?

After having delivered SOA Training to various clients this summer and fall many have asked how to deal with change. The contract is the center piece of services and with an effective versioning strategy it can be difficult to alter due to coupling that occurs with service consumers. David Orchard, James Pasley and others have been documenting versioning strategies. From my work with David on the SOA Patterns book(Erl 2008) and my consulting with organizations employing Agile Methodology, contract refactoring/change is a mandatory requirement.

Identifying a versioning strategy such as Strict, Flexible or Loose along with Versioning Identification and Compatibility design patterns provides a foundation for indicating change and providing consistency in managing the consumer impact.

For further details check out a presentation related to mixing Agile along with SOA Design Patterns and Meet in the Middle Strategy.

SOA Symposium 2.0: Rotterdam, Netherlands

It is amazing another year has passed and SOA Symposium 2.0 is around the corner. As part of the presentation work, two areas that I have focused on in blog postings and customer work is in Agile Methodology and Service Hacking. Check out the presentations and feel free to post any questions.