The union of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Oracle SOA Suite is a match made in heaven. Recently, we tested Amazon EC2 by marrying components of Oracle SOA Suite with EC2 to demonstrate how utility computing and SOA are shaking the foundations of current IT provisioning, development, deployment and maintenance models. This article examines how SOA technologies enable utility computing to move beyond the vision stage and become a reality.

Amazon EC2 is a massive farm of Linux servers at your fingertips. It enables you to bring up a single server or many server instances—all installed with preconfigured Linux images—with a single command. You can use pre-packed Linux images provided by EC2 (public images currently available include Apache and MySQL) or build brand new images and upload them to Amazon S3, a flexible and inexpensive storage service. Organizations have to anticipate expected load/traffic and plan the capacity accordingly. Amazon EC2 eliminates the need to do capacity planning. Moreover, due to uncertainty of traffic, organizations often waste capacity during idle time. Dynamic provisioning of Amazon EC2 instances empowers the organization to scale up and down based on the load making optimum use of the infrastructure, smoothing out utilization curves, and saving costs.

The recently released Oracle SOA Suite 10g is a packaged set of standards-based components for enabling modern, Web services-based SOA. Oracle SOA Suite covers Web services development, orchestration, monitoring, and security. Within the SOA Suite, Oracle BPEL Process Manager orchestrates transactions across disparate applications within and across corporate boundaries. But across all such technologies, what is important in the context of this article is that they be Web service enabled and support a grid computing model where several low-cost servers can be deployed in a cluster to provide scalability and high availability.

Web services-based SOA has fundamentally changed how applications integrate. Add to that a Web services-based utility computing infrastructure from Amazon EC2 to host your business operations, and you get a potent combination. The significant, yet unnoticed breakthrough of Amazon EC2 is in its ability to spawn a server instance by a mere Web service call. In addition to a command line interface, EC2 provides a detailed provisioning WSDL that can be used by any Web services application to dynamically control (e.g., run, terminate, authorize) Linux instances within the Amazon Cloud.

This EC2 provisioning enables WSDL-aware products to readily call into EC2 through SOAP-based messaging. Because of this approach, SOA platform products and orchestration languages like BPEL can be extended beyond their typical application development role to manage infrastructure provisioning. Now the same components that run business applications can also control dynamic provisioning and maintenance of the very physical infrastructure on which they are deployed. With Amazon EC2, for the first time, SOA components are aware of and in control of their host machines and can clone new instances of themselves based on environmental factors such as user load, available resources, and cost.

Shifting Sands: New Business & Usage Models

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a pragmatic beginning to utility computing that has the potential of transforming how IT assets are used. With EC2, a number of new business models and shifts are emerging, such as:

Software Rentals: Software as a Service (SaaS) moves from renting entire business applications such as salesforce.com and NetSuite to renting industrial strength software components. Companies like Oracle, SAP, BEA and IBM now offer SaaS but have to create their own enterprise-strength infrastructure for it. Typically, they only offer entire packaged applications through this model. An external compute capacity provider like EC2 brings the same capability to all organizations, while grid-enabled SOA infrastructure and applications mean they can actually take advantage of it.

Of course, open source software fits this model particularly well. In EC2 beta, Amazon has provided public images of Apache and MySQL, indicating the direction of things to come.

Zero-Configuration Services: AMIs are pre-configured, pre-packaged templates that can be instantiated by a simple Web service call. Software vendors can “ship” their products in the form of pre-configured images that will never require any sort of configuration and/or installation and just work. With the ability to pass in configuration data to instances at launch time (parameterized launches), AMIs can be created more generic in nature and vendors can “ship” generic images and instantiate instances with “editions.” For example, an Oracle AMI can be packaged to spawn an “Oracle App Server with 8i DB” instance or an “Oracle App Server with 10g DB” instance.

Value-Add Services: Much like Strike Iron and Xignite provide functions for rent, a new breed of service providers will emerge that harness the scale of Amazon EC2 to provide and charge for general purpose and business-specific Web services.

General-purpose Web services are independent of business process and can include operations such as time-stamping, signing, encrypting, validating, or archiving a SOAP message. Business-specific services are related to core business functions and may include operations such as calculating mortgage payments, sales commissions, or sales tax. Rentable business-specific operations may mature into manageable modules of complex business processes such as processing insurance claims, aggregated items catalogs or fulfilling customer orders. Amazon EC2 Images can be shared with other users. This will enable users to reuse existing AMIs (created by other users) that are completely pre-configured with installed software (say Oracle App Server with Oracle 10g DB and Ordering BPEL process).

IT Asset Marketplace: Amazon EC2 is ideal for building shareable & reusable services. For example, User-1 can share with User-2 an entire pre-packaged EC2 Linux image with configured applications. Imagine an “AMI Marketplace” where users could shop for images to reuse and in fact even start working on somebody else’s unfinished work (AMI). The marketplace concept could be further extended to enable corporations to sell their under-utilized assets dynamically and buy required assets from sellers. IT asset trading exchanges could become a possibility although such exchanges would only follow heavy commoditization and liquidity of such services.

Outsourcing Testing: There will be a new twist in quality assurance and testing, especially the outsourcing companies. Since outsourcing companies can provision instances as “testboxes” and since they only pay for as much as they use, they now have the ability to bill their customers for infrastructure they used for a project and also relinquish the “testboxes” when the project is over. Not to mention, they can get as many “testboxes” as they need at their disposal for stress/load/functional testing.

Conclusion: Gestalt

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 a 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. Over time, business models, service level agreements, and regulatory requirements will all find a happy balance to optimize IT assets’ efficiency. We anticipate that Amazon EC2 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 that could be called “economic gestalt:” the whole costs much less than the sum of the parts.

This article was originally published by Dr. Dobb’s Journal, www.ddj.com, copyright 2007, CMP Technology LLC.