No sooner do I pen a blog saying that so-called ‘cloud computing’ is not a new concept or even one that ushers in anything particularly new, than a press release lands on my desk espousing the virtues of cloud computing for extending SOA beyond the enterprise…[click continue reading for more]…I think it was Cape Clear that first talked about on-demand integration, or integration on-demand, long before it was acquired by Workday. Workday has kept the idea going in fact, and still has an Integration On Demand offering based on Cape Clear’s enterprise service bus (ESB).
Informatica, too has an integration on demand offering. I think Hubspan calls its salesforce.com connectors integration on demand, too, and there are probably others I’ve forgotten.
But according to a release from open source ESB firm MuleSource, “As the cloud becomes a more and more realistic deployment option, SOA can now exist outside the enterprise. The Cloud is effectively becoming another server, albeit with huge scale. Point is – it shouldn’t matter where the server lies…AND while use cases that require security and backup are not optimum for the Cloud, there are plenty that are including:
– Software download where you have multiple repositories
– Distribution to geographies
– If you are federating from Enterprise to Cloud (where it’s OK for a node to go down
– Demos”
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OK, so the above use cases aren’t exactly the mission-critical applications that keep the lights on for enterprises, but I guess they have their place. The question I still keep asking though, is do any of the above really require ‘The Cloud’, and haven’t we been doing them for years with other hosted technologies anyway?
