Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is system management software that delivers centralized monitoring, administration, and life-cycle management functionality for the complete IT infrastructure, including systems running Oracle and non-Oracle technologies.

1. No code is an island
2. Bandwidth is no longer free
3. Energy is no longer free, either

No code is an island

Having worked in integration project for almost a decade the idea that there is little code living on an island is not strange to me. However InfoWorld points out that besides that more and more software developer are creating products to enhance other products

Our code is living increasingly in ecosystems. Many PHP programmers, for instance, create plug-ins for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other framework. Their code is a module that works with other modules.

The same goes for development for mobile devices that rely increasingly on modules or apps created by others, whether they run on the device or in the cloud. This increases the demand for stable interfaces and contracts. Besides that the requirements for availability and scalability will weigh in heavier.

An urge for lean programming

Or create programs that deliver value in an efficient way. New releases of software programmers tend to demand always more resources (just a small example). The cost of keeping a computer plugged in has never been an issue. It never mattered how much energy your rack of servers sucked down because the colo just sent you a flat bill for each box.

The Cloud trend tends to make cost more transparent. Some of the clouds — like Google App Engine or Amazon S3 (example) — don’t bill by the rack or root password. They charge for database commits and queries. This adds a new perspective for software developers. We might need to start thinking about the cost of each subroutine in euros, not in lines of code, function points or milliseconds of execution time.

On the consumer side more and more ISPs adding bandwidth caps and metering. To a software developer this means that optimizing bandwidth consumption when designing apps is becoming imperative. Besides the cost issue this will also be needed because of the customer experience (loading speed etc).

The definition used for Cloud Computing is:

Cloud computing is a specialized form of distributed computing that introduces utilization models for remotely provisioning scalable and measured IT resources.

The definition used for Semantic Web Technologies is:

Semantic Web Technologies represents a technology platform used to describe artifacts, their properties, and their relationships using machine-processable language.

SOA and Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing and Semantic Web technology

…

• Expert Speaker Sessions
• 10+ Conference Tracks
• 4 Expert Panels
• 4 Keynote Speeches

Given the location simultaneous translation (English-Portuguese-English) will be available in all technical sessions. For the complete agenda or resources from previous conference, check the site. Videos from the 2010 edition of the SOA Symposium can be found on InfoQ.

• Cloudy SOA
• BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010
• Resurrecting SOA

Cloudy SOA

This session on Cloudy SOA by Mark Little covers:

an introduction to cloud computing pointing to the fact that the middleware needs of the cloud are similar to SOA’s, showing some of the benefits of running SOA along with the cloud, asking if cloud computing and SOA should evolve together and giving some future directions to consider.

BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010

Hanjo Normann’s session presenting the BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010 covers:

how to design a BPM/SOA solution including: modeling human interaction, improving BPM models, orchestrating composed services, central task management, new approaches for business-IT alignment, solutions for non-deterministic processes, and choreography.

Resurrecting SOA

Anne Thomas Manes in her Resurrecting SOA session goes into details on why she:

believes organizations need SOA more than before, but using a redefined SOA based on the SOA Manifesto, focusing on models, methodologies and patterns, not on technology, intended to produce the desired business and technical goals.

For a complete overview of SOA Symposium sessions on InfoQ check their SOA Symposium page.

SOA Suite on EC2

Setting up Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3)

This arcticle on OTN guided me while signing up for:

• Amazon AWS
• Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service
• Amazon EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud

and to setup PuTTY. The only hick-up here was that I’m using the PortableApps version of PuTTY that doesn’t come with the puttygen – Key Generator.

Provisioning a SOA Server on Amazon EC2

This blogpost guided me in the provisioning of the AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

• AMIs are per region: The Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) for SOA Suite (id = ami-acb557c5) is only available in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region.
• Don’t bother to setup the Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume. It is scripted in the latest version of the AMI, as described in step 5 of “SSH to your image and accept license”. The EBS Volume is seeded using a snapshot (id = snap-dd980db4) that is provided. This volume will be used to persist your data across sessions and AMI start/stop.
• When launching the image (during the Configure Firewall step) set the SecurityGroup to accept HTTP traffic on port 7001 in case you want to use the SOA Suite from outside the Image.