SOA and cloud together: 'swarm computing' arrives

Enterprises now face the prospect of the development of a new generation of spaghetti architecture -- this time called cloud computing.

In this recently released video, Jürgen Kress, founder of the Oracle EMEA SOA Partner Community and the global Oracle SOA Partner Advisory Council, talks about the need for service oriented architecture to enable cloud computing to function at the enterprise level. In Kress's presentation at the International SOA & Cloud Symposium, he says "you have to build your architecture right," and that means an SOA underpinning.

To make cloud happen in large enterprises, organizations need the flexibility SOA and BPM technologies can provide.  "We need to make cloud more intelligent and more autonomous," he says. "You really need rules driven processes."

Kress also alluded to the potential of internal app stores to deliver capabilities on an on-demand basis. "It's a centralized store, with everything where you build your whole process, you have all your objects and services all centralized in one place -- like a Google Apps store, but just for one company."

The internal app store enables business people to quickly build process integration for new business ventures or products. "If you have an app store, its easy to pick it and use it again." Kress issues a cautionary note about the need for SOA:

"If you don't do your architecture right, you just create more spaghetti architecture in the cloud. We have done that for years, creating spaghetti architecture.  You will just continue to build spaghetti, and you will make them worse because you put them in the cloud. The best clouds in the world really cannot be leveraged without SOA.  You really have to do your homework on your SOA architecture before you can really leverage your cloud."