Gartner has just posted a quick report on SOA and Cloud Computing: “Cloud Computing Will Cement the Mainstream Role of SOA” (SOA stands for Service-Oriented Architecture).

The report argues that Cloud Computing is an evolution of multiple technologies “including virtualization, workload hosting, consumerization of IT, Web architectures, metadata-based software engineering, grid computing, extreme transaction processing, open source, SOA and more.” From that the authors make the next step and assume that cloud computing solutions actually is based on SOA architectures and thus while getting widely spread will (finally) make SOA approach mainstream.

In my opinion, on the one hand this is all common sense, and web interfaces are the obvious API approach for cloud/SaaS applications, and thus indeed in that way make SOA finally become widely spread.

On the other hand, equaling cloud/web applications to SOA is actually wrong. Any applications – even traditional on-premise rich clients – may or may not expose programmatic access (APIs). Some do and some don’t. Those which expose APIs can design them well or just stick something together the very last moment when a customer or partner demands them. Things will obviously be similar in the cloud world. In my company (Quest Software) we are doing our best to expose well-designed APIs (PowerShell for on-premise applications and web-services for services) but I would not expect every team in every software company follow this approach.

Overall, this is a very short report (less than one page of actual text) with a $195 price tag, so you might want to spend the money elsewhere. However, obviously do buy it if you need an analyst-approved document to prove to your boss that SOA is important.

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing, Gartner, Analysts, SOA
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |