[CAnet - news] The Grand unification of Grids, SOA, workflow, Amazon EC2 and Oracle

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[This is excellent article showing how BPEL workflow integrate SOA
applications across multiple utility computing facilities. I think these
type of platform architectures are going to transform academic research and
business practices. The EC2 concept of instantiating computing services as a
web service, is very similar to the CANARIR concept of instantiating IP
networks through a web service. See www.uclp.ca.  In the near future I
suspect we all sorts of physical resources such as computing, networks,
instruments, etc instantiated as a web service and linked together through
BPEL compositions. Some excerpts -- BSA]

http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/196900803?pgno=1

The union of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Oracle SOA Suite is a
match made in heaven. Recently, we tested Amazon EC2 by marrying components
of Oracle SOA Suite with EC2 to demonstrate how  utility computing and SOA
are shaking the foundations of current IT provisioning, development,
deployment and maintenance models. This article examines how SOA
technologies enable utility computing to move beyond the vision stage and
become a reality.

Amazon EC2 is a massive farm of Linux servers at your finger tips. It
enables you to bring up a single server or many server instances -- all
installed with preconfigured Linux images -- with a single command. You can
use pre-packed Linux images provided by EC2 -- public images are currently
available that include Apache and MySQL -- or build new images and upload
them to Amazon's S3 storage service.

The recently released Oracle SOA Suite 10g is a packaged set of
standards-based components for enabling web services-based SOA. Oracle SOA
Suite covers web services development, orchestration, monitoring, and
security. Within the SOA Suite, Oracle BPEL Process Manager orchestrates
transactions across disparate applications within and across corporate
boundaries. But across all such technologies, what is important in the
context of this article is that they be Web-service enabled and support a
grid computing model where several low-cost servers can be deployed in a
cluster to provide scalability and high availability.

Web services-based SOA has fundamentally changed how applications integrate.
Add on top of that Amazon EC2 to host your business operations, and you get
a potent combination. The significant, yet unnoticed breakthrough of Amazon
EC2 is in its ability to spawn up a server instance by a mere web-service
call. In addition to a command line interface, EC2 provides a detailed
provisioning WSDL that can be used by any web-services application to
dynamically control (e.g., run, terminate, authorize) Linux instances within
the Amazon Cloud.

This EC2 provisioning enables WSDL-aware products to readily call into EC2
through SOAP-based messaging. Because of this approach, SOA platform
products and orchestration languages like BPEL can now be extended beyond
their typical application development role to also manage infrastructure
provisioning. Now the same components which run business applications can
also control dynamic provisioning and maintenance of the very physical
infrastructure that they are deployed on. With Amazon EC2, for the first
time, SOA components are aware of and in control of their host machines and
can clone new instances of themselves based on environmental factors such as
user load, available resources and cost.


Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is an ideal hosting environment for commodity
SOA components. Web services-based administration and provisioning of Linux
servers on-the-fly heralds a new era of dynamic traffic management. With
such flexible SOA components, reliable, resilient, scalable and
high-performance SOA deployments can be built on utility computing
infrastructure that lives outside corporate boundaries. Some simple
enhancements to the Amazon Web services API and open collaboration with the
developer community as well as with commercial software vendors could
position Amazon EC2 as the utility computing platform of choice. Overtime,
business models, service level agreements, and regulatory requirements will
all find a happy balance to optimize IT assets' efficiency. We anticipate
that the Amazon EC2 cloud coupled with grid-enabled software like Oracle SOA
Suite will help realize IT gestalt: The whole is greater than the sum of the
parts. At the same time, the ability to share computing pools across many
users can smooth out the issues of peak loads for much more efficient use of
resources. This will enable an effect which could be called "economic
gestalt": the whole costs much less than the sum of the parts .

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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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