Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Why Service Orientation Is Important to Each of the Cloud Models

When you have some of the background on what it means to take a service-oriented approach to architecting technology systems, you can begin to see the relationship between this approach and cloud computing. Services are important for cloud computing from both an infrastructure and an application perspective.

Service orientation permeates the cloud, and the cloud serves as an environment that can host other services (either at a technical or a business level). Therefore, cloud vendors need to think about the architecture of their platforms so they can support different business models. Here are two different scenarios that a cloud provider may have to deal with:

On the one hand, cloud providers built the cloud infrastructure on well-designed services with clearly defined black-box interfaces. These black-box services allow the cloud to scale. In order to execute this approach, the cloud infrastructure needs to be service-oriented.

On the other hand, companies building applications designed for the cloud tend to build them out as services, which makes it easier for customers and partners to use them. For example, SaaS providers need an ecosystem of partners that provides either complementary components or full applications ...