Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo

SOA: Practice of Grand Unification

Oracle SOA Suite components and Amazon EC2 Grid Provisioning both provide native support for Web services. This enables Web services-aware client tools, such as SOAPSonar to act as a unifying console for end-to-end testing and management. Figure 4 shows a screen shot of SOAPSonar with a number of WSDLs loaded. As shown in Figure 1, the WSDLs can be categorized as Provisioning WSDLs , those that help manage the environment, and Transactional WSDLs , those that are used to pass SOAP messages for business processes. With a unified console such as SOAPSonar users can readily manage multiple Linux instances, manipulate storage, and test transactions across SOA components.

Figure 4: SOAPSonar Console controlling Amazon S3, EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite.

Within a complex SOA deployment that goes across corporate boundaries, a product like SOAPSonar can enable:

Provisioning: Control both hardware and software assets provisioning from a single console. User can create Linux images on Amazon S3, provision them on Linux Servers, start and stop such servers, add newer instance of an image stored on S3. Beyond just hardware provisioning, the user can also control software assets such as Oracle OC4J within the Amazon Cloud through simple SOAP API calls.

Unit Testing: Each software component can be unit tested independently from within the same console. A user can ensure that all published services are up and running and meet functional, performance, and interoperability base-line requirements.

Production Controls: Users can test SOA component reliability, scalability, fault-tolerance and availability by pointing the test console to different components within the SOA deployment and continuously checking the health of published services against established base-lines.

As shown in Figure 4, SOAPSonar provides Unified Provisioning and Transaction Controls for SOA components deployed in a utility computing model.

Dynamic Provisioning: We are starting to see enterprises deploy automated business processes using standards like BPEL and put in place rich real-time monitoring dashboards using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) products like Oracle BAM. The power of BAM is that an organization can monitor in real-time how they are doing in terms of processing business transactions and meeting service level agreements. This provides business visibility into conditions that may cause SLAs to be violated. However, besides being aware of the problem, the real value here is only achieved when the problem can be addressed is a timely fashion. With utility computing approaches like EC2 that can be provisioned dynamically, we believe that self-regulating systems will start to emerge such that a system will identify a need for additional computing power, generate an alert (because people will always want to know about such a condition), and then automatically provision new grid servers to handle the surge in load. When the surge abates, the additional servers can be released. While such self-regulating systems may seem futuristic, all the pieces are in place today for them to emerge.

Optimized SOA

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is an ideal hosting environment for commodity SOA components. Web services-based administration and provisioning of Linux servers on-the-fly heralds a new era of dynamic traffic management. With such flexible SOA components, reliable, resilient, scalable and high-performance SOA deployments can be built on utility computing infrastructure that lives outside corporate boundaries. Some simple enhancements to the Amazon Web services API and open collaboration with the developer community as well as with commercial software vendors could position Amazon EC2 as the utility computing platform of choice. Overtime, business models, service level agreements, and regulatory requirements will all find a happy balance to optimize IT assets’ efficiency. We anticipate that the Amazon EC2 cloud coupled with grid-enabled software like Oracle SOA Suite will help realize IT gestalt: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. At the same time, the ability to share computing pools across many users can smooth out the issues of peak loads for much more efficient use of resources. This will enable an effect which could be called “economic gestalt”: the whole costs much less than the sum of the parts .

Mamoon Yunus is CTO of Forum Systems and a pioneer of SOA Gateways & Firewalls. Prior to Forum, Mr. Yunus was at webMethods where he developed XML-based techology. Mamoon holds two Graduate Degrees in Engineering from MIT.

Rizwan Mallal is Technology Director at Crosscheck Networks and Chief Security Architect of Forum Systems. Previously, Rizwan held various positions at Sonicwall and Raptor (now Symantec). Rizwan holds a Masters in Computer Science from University of Vermont.

David Shaffer is Sr. Director of Product Management at Oracle for the Oracle SOA Suite and Integration products. Prior to Oracle, he has held leadership roles at a wide-range of technology companies including Collaxa, Apple Computer and NeXT Software. Dave can be reached at [email protected].