Enterprise architects know there is a dual-edged sword to service-oriented architecture. That is: When SOA succeeds and component re-use occurs, popular services can become overtaxed, and performance suffers. That turns out to be one of the places where emerging Cloud computing can help,
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Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
said an executive with an early Cloud pioneer.
"What people are trying to achieve with SOA is a high level of reuse. People want to put a service out and then include that service in another application to get reuse out of it," said Sam Charrington, vice president of product management at Appistry.
But, what if there is a big uptick in use? There is recourse with Cloud, said Charrington. "If your service, or set of services, gets consumed by another application that has a much higher load all you need to do is go to your Cloud provider and turn on some additional virtual machines," he said.
With Cloud computing, he indicated, you can in effect build scalability and reliability into services.
It bears similarities to cluster computing, data grid and cloud computing.
"Our Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric takes care of the integration, providing the end services in a very scalable way," said Charrington. "It provides that last mile to making high levels of reuse in SOA practical."
Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric helped pioneer the Cloud concept, which Charrington admits has been something of a concept in search of a term. "We've always talked about it as an application fabric, not quite a Grid, more fluid than a Grid. It's not quite a cluster. It has better scalability and is easier to manage than a cluster," he said.
Founded in 2001, Appistry has a fairly long lineage in distributed computing. "We've been doing Cloud before Cloud was cool," said the Appistry executive.
Appirstry today announced partnerships with two Cloud providers, GoGrid and SkyTap, designed to advance Cloud computing by providing free access to software that allows IT departments to move Windows and Linux applications into the new architecture.