Mainframe SOA: SOA Brings the Mainframe to the Clouds

by David S. Linthicum
October 15, 2009

You would have to be living under a rock to not see all the hype around cloud computing these days. In case you were wondering, you’ve seen this movie before. It’s all about leveraging remotely delivered shared resources—aka time sharing.

Cloud computing does bring some new advantages over the traditional time-sharing model, including the ability to leverage resources at a much more granular level; resources such as database, storage, and application processes. You can mix and match these cloud-delivered resources to create new solutions.

Cloud computing doesn’t create any new approaches to computing. It’s all about where those resources are located, and the fact they can be quickly provisioned, scaled up, and scaled down as you need the computing power. Therefore, they’re adjustable as to need and cost, and therein exists the core strategic advantage.

If you think your job is in danger of moving to the clouds, think again. While many applications are great fits for cloud computing, traditional mainframe-based applications are typically not cost-effective for an on-premise to cloud computing migration. At least, that’s what I’m finding in my practice. New applications typically are good fits, and your enterprise could quickly find that you’re looking at a cross between cloud computing and on-premise systems, with a great deal of work required to make them mesh together.

Integration is typically an afterthought as things move to the clouds. Once we begin to place processing out on platforms such as Amazon EC2 or Force.com, suddenly somebody understands that the information residing in the cloud-based systems has to eventually make its way back to the on-premise systems. So, how do you make that happen?

At the end of the day, cloud computing is all about defining a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and extending that architecture to the platforms of the clouds. We go through the now traditional process of breaking the architecture down to a functional primitive and building it up again as something better— something more agile, something that can address the core system assets as services and modify the use of those services as solutions.

The side benefit of an SOA approach, including an approach that encompasses the existing mainframe systems, is that it creates natural interfaces that expose both application behaviors and data to other applications and processes. This is part of the natural process of defining and implementing an SOA. Within the “to be” architecture, existing mainframe-based systems will find their interfaces well-defined as they’re prepared to participate within an SOA. Many look to extend their architecture outside the enterprise to the platform of the clouds, leveraging their critical systems that are almost always mainframe-based. SOA provides you with both the architectural patterns and the technical mechanisms to make that happen.