Two days long we participated in the International SOA & Cloud Symposium in Berlin. We attended many presentations and had some great discussions around these two subjects. In the upcoming time we will share our knowledge and experiences with you. In this post we will present you some of our highlights and conclusions.
The Symposium took place at the Berlin Congres Center and was very well organized. It was a pleasure being there, being able to discuss with the opinion leaders in this industry. Below you will find our key findings after attending the Symposium.
- Most companies have way too many applications and databases which leads to data redundancy, causing data integrity risks, high maintenance costs, etc.
- Every application developer should design an application with SOA principles in mind.
- The Cloud offers stable services which could be used in a production environment.
- More and more companies start experimenting with cloud services and cloud computing.
- Cloud services and computing are being used to add more agility to application development.
- The Cloud won’t solve all today’s problems and it introduces new challenges, meaning if an application is not performing on the current infrastructure the cloud will not necessarily be a solution.
- Cloud providers in most cases won’t be able to offer a single vendor solutions, hybrid solutions will still be needed.
- The lack of standardization blocks the interoperability and application mobility.
- Cloud computing providers don’t offer reliable realtime monitoring about their performance.
- Pay-as-you-go offers seem to enable you to save cost, but on the other hand it makes cost also less predictable.
- It’s rather hard to compare the offer of the cloud providers due to the fact they use different specifications and limitations.
- Performance guarantees are still an issue, good SLA’s are lacking.
- Moving an application to the Cloud demands a Cloud based design, you cannot just wrap an existing application to bring it to the cloud (you could try of course, but you will hardly profit).
- Security management is essential to gain business trust, more and more solutions are available.
- Database performance of cloud providers Amazon, Google and Azure is impressive. Replication of multiple databases takes place within maximum 20 ms. This is sufficient for most applications.
- Business users shouldn’t be bothered with terms like SOA, cloud, services. They want to hear about availability, flexibility, time to market, cost saving, etc. The Cloud can offer these!
The bottom line conclusion is that cloud services and cloud computing are ready to be used, they can be cost effective and decrease your time to market. You will be better able to handle unexpected increases in demand of your service and backup and recovery is a lot easier. But don’t start with your business critical services, better experiment first.
Image credits: Geek & Poke