Cloud Service Provider - Architectural Landscape

Cloud Computing Risks

1. Risks when consuming Cloud
a. Availability
b. Data back up
c. Disaster recovery
d. Problem Resolution
e. Quality of Service
f. Security
g. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
h. Compliance
2. Risks when Supporting the cloud
a. Fail over and redundancy
b. Provisioning
c. Security
d. Adherence to SLAs
e. Metering
f. Disaster recovery

Risk and Security concerns with Cloud Computing

Many of the risks associated with Cloud computing are not new and can be found in any enterprise which has sufficiently big IT assets portfolio and does its business with help of out-sourcing and off-shoring. Some of the risks an enterprise must mange to have successful Cloud computing strategy are:

1. Cloud computing providers’ reputation, history, technological stability, financial and business stability, certification, SLA offered, openness of platform must be taken into account while selecting a cloud computing provider.
2. Cloud computing platform’s stability, scalability, elasticity and SLAs must be discounted.
3. Consider where information will reside ( trans boarder information flow) and you at right side of compliance.
4. Disaster recovery mechanism offered by cloud.
5. Network traffic cost and latency to be discounted.
6. Potential of mixing up data with other tenants.
7. Software licensing cost
8. Out sourcing partners capabilities with respect to cloud.
9. Integration of cloud and non cloud application.
10. Testing of application on cloud environment.

Layered Architecture and SOA

Recently I had an architectural evaluation at one of my client. While discussing the architectural aspects with fellow architects and designers, I realized that there is very low understanding of SOA. Most of the persons were aware of Service, webservice, XML, ESB, Rule Engine, WS* standards in silo and most probably even in one application. But when multiple applications communicate, still thinking is in era of layered architecture. Most of the persons not ready to realize that layered architecture is not confined to one application but also across applications and services. Applications and services have their own layers but in bigger picture applications and services also fall into some layer.

I hope as SOA become wide spread and more practiced, this confusion will go away.

Testing Environment on Private Cloud

Every enterprise keeps a test environment to test its IT applications. IT team always tries to keep Test and Production environment similar if not identical for the obvious reasons. But to keep the cost under control Business team wants to keep testing environment to minimum. This is an ongoing challenge. Every side has its own argument.

IT team wants to minimize the risk by testing the application in environment similar to production while business team has an argument of low utilization of test environment.

Cloud computing provide very elegant solution of the challenge. If test environment is deployed on Private Cloud, conflicting arguments from both IT and Business teams can be handled in one go.

What is SOA?

• Architectural Principle
o Define how a community engages

• Enterprise Strategy
o Flexibility from the business standpoint

• Technology
o No, it’s not Yet Another Integration Technology
o It’s got very little to do with that at all

10 Key Measures of SOA Successful SOA Implementation

• Financial

– Revenue per service (currency/service)
– Service vitality index (amount of revenue from new services over the last 12 months compared to all service revenue) (%)

• Management

– Number of new services generated and used as a percentage of total services (%)
– Mean time to Service Development (MTTSD) (time)
– Mean time to Service Change (MTTSC) (time)
– Service Availability (%)

•  Project

– Service reuse (%)
– Cost of not using or stopping a service (currency, time)

• Service

– Service complexity, as measured through cyclomatic complexity (unit-less)
– Service quality assurance confidence, derived through service code coverage (%)

Role of Registry in the Service Lifecycle

Registry is “System of Record” for Service Lifecycle

What does SOA help solve?

• Future integration challenges
o SOA helps reduce the number of moving parts

• Future infrastructure flexibility
o SOA helps codify the use of applications rather than focusing on the applications

• Solution for complexity in IT environments
o Decompose the environment
o Incrementally address different issues
o Reduce the fear