We go to the ATM nowadays than to the bank counter for our banking needs. And some even use the Internet banking more than the ATM. Self service models revolutionized the services sector, with 24/7/365 access to services.
The same self service models are made possible for IT operations in enterprises, thanks to the cloud technologies. If one wanted a new machine even for testing or trying out something , with some software configuration, it used to take weeks if not months, for that request to be serviced by IT departments. But now, it can be made available within few minutes, thanks to cloud computing. One can go to Amazon EC2, and get a powerful machine instance, and it will take less than five minutes, it is up and running and is ready to use. And it is quite like the ATM model. It is self service and fully automated.
Not only for infrastructure facilities where you are looking for processing power with some operating system, but also for situations where you want a machine with service hosting capabilities to test and try out a new service implementation, this is possible. In other words, platforms are available as services. And with zero installation time and zero configuration time, you are ready to use a middleware stack, on the cloud. If you are a developer, you might know, how long it would have taken to download (provided it is open source, of-course) or purchase a middleware stack, install and configure prior to using the setup at all to implement and try something out. Cloud computing can revolutionize this model and expedite it to a great deal, in that, the only thing that the developer has to do is to sing in for an account, and then use the middleware platform services.
What would be the ingredients of a middleware platform as a service setup?
Service hosting, data services, governance, identity management, enterprise service bus, business process management tools, rules services, mashups, portals/dashboards and business activity monitoring can all be part of a platform as a service offering.
Not only developers, but also IT specialists as well as business specialists can benefit from such a cloud based model for middleware. Developers can develop, test and deploy in quick time. IT folks can easily enforce policies with governance, monitor setup with monitoring and tune deployments with portals. Business folks can model business process, monitor and tune business processes with business rules. All parties in the enterprise can focus on the core business aspects, without having to worry about things such as computing capacity, version incompatibilities among different elements, and maintenance headaches. Technologies such as auto scaling will take care of computing capacity. The cloud vendor will take care of maintaining middleware setup and software versions. It is like Facebook for middleware.
Comments