Cloud Computing Solutions

The main features and key characteristics of SOA are described below so that the readers can easily understand the real use of SOA in cloud computing and why the SOA characteristics are combined with cloud architecture.

Black-box component concept in SOA: The main feature of black box is reusability of existing business applications. When the developers are mounting new applications, they feel free to reuse the advantages of existing applications; black box is simply adding adapter to them. The service consumers don’t really need to be on familiar terms with the details of what is going on inside each component. SOA hides the underlying structure and the complexity.

Loose coupling: Previously, in traditional structure, the different software components are extremely dependent on each other and that makes the applications more complex and time-consuming. A bit change on one component makes lots of changes in others. So, to make the applications more feasible to the customers, the components of SOA have been made loosely coupled, which is the independent modular approach which makes the developer feel free to keep the software modules together and reuse them according to the needs of the user. Loosely coupled components can interchange the data between them after processing. One component does its task and passes the data to another neighboring component which carries out the job and either keeps the data or passes on the data accordingly. You might be a bit confused regarding the software module. What is a software module? How is it used? How can it be reused? However, we will consider an example so that we can understand the concept of software module. Software module is nothing but a collection of coding. If users want to access resources from their service provider, they make a request to the provider. The provider handles the request and gives permission. So, there is a need for authentication and authorization. This is done with a coding component. This code can be done in an application-specific or independent coding way. The latter is more useful because we can use this type of independent coding as a software module and with some modification of this coding module we are able to reuse that component.

Service-oriented architecture: SOA supports an environment where different components are arranged in such a way that SOA is able to deliver a business service. While designing SOA service, developers incorporate some service-level agreements (SLA) so that a standard platform can be built for business management. This is called business process management (BPM). BPM is highly required to maintain the alignment of business service.

Now we are moving on to the life cycle of services in SOA. A service life cycle is required to understand the sequential activities, processes and the physical and computing resources necessary for designing, building, developing, deploying and finally executing and delivering the services that make up SOA.

When a service is requested, then it has to be realized in a business process and has to be processed in a particular service life cycle. To understand how a business service can be realized in real-time procedure, Figure 3.1shows a schematic diagram of the service life cycle in SOA.

Service analysis: This is the analytical study of a particular business process and its rationalization of capabilities in different fields of business service like service contracts, agreements, globalization, etc. Driven by the different strategies and policies of the service provider, the business case is established, and those strategies and policies will be used in future stages.

Service development: After the analysis phase, the development phase creates the business service as required by the customers. It is the phase where service developers write the coding part which leads to rationalization of different contracts and business service is implemented through this phase. Service developers also create the web-based interface through which the customers can easily get the services.

Figure 3.1: Life cycle of SOA.

Service testing: Service testing is the phase which comes after the development phase and it contains a test data module for testing purpose. In this phase, in-progress software can be periodically checked for errors, regressions, and also for debugging. Sometimes, performance testing and functional testing is also done in this phase for maintaining quality of service (QoS).

Service provisioning: When the testing phase is completed, service is ready to be utilized and the service is provisioned to the users. While consuming the service, the users have to maintain the service-level agreements (SLA) because they are using properly designed production infrastructure. When each term and all the rules and regulations of SLAs are found satisfactory, dedicated business service is successfully provisioned to the customers.

Service operation: This is a key phase in the life cycle. There are various types of activities done by the Management API, which is the management infrastructure responsible for the following operations: metered usage of services, performance optimization, service updating, enabling authentication, authorization procedure, maintaining data privacy, generating business strategies, providing dynamic provisioning, monitoring transactions, reporting, and keeping metadata.

Service consumption: This can be understood by its name alone. A business service is consumed by the users. Service is getting consumed through web services; whenever service providers validate some business services, the customers as well as the providers maintain some regulations, which are as follows: security policies, service dependencies, agreement level policies, resource provisioning rules, service syntax and semantics, and also capability.

Service change management: In any IT business application or business service, there may be a sudden change while interacting with the customer. So there is a phase that has the authority to control the service change management, keeping in mind that the existing customers should not be affected. In addition to security, privacy as well as SLA policies, the technology platform change is of primary concern in this phase. This phase leads the service developers to be more flexible.

Service decommissions: In this phase of the cycle, data is transferred and unused data are cleaned up. An acknowledgment message is also transferred from the user and even from the related organization’s end. As there are changes in different business strategies, service providers try their best to provide better services. And this phase also has the ability to decommission services.

We have already discussed the cloud services and also basic concepts of SOA. Cloud services benefit from service-oriented orchestration. The modular approach of SOA is advantageous and getting attached with cloud services. When cloud services and the service-oriented approach are combined, service providers benefit because they can provide the services according to the requirements of the cloud users. Moreover, cloud users also get the advantages of this combinatorial approach because they are getting services according to how much they need. So, they have to pay for how much they have used. And this is the concept of “pay-per-use.”

Cloud architectures are built in such a way that components can be reused in an efficient way and those will be effectively compatible with the service-oriented approach. In the SOA approach to modeling software, software is organized in terms of services, each capturing reusable functionality that can be discovered at run time and accessed in a location transparent manner through well-defined, open standards technology-based interfaces. Although SOA is not a new concept, it has been receiving considerable attention in recent years [8].