I am writing a paper for an external conference and journal that defines the requirements and technology for effectively managing cloud-enabled/spanning applications. I wanted to share my observations of how businesses can fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing and gain the associated improvements in business performance while achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

This entry—the first of three on this topic—explains the role of composite applications in cloud computing. The second entry will cover the importance of providing and consuming cloud services to optimize composite applications and to achieve business agility through cloud spanning applications. The third will discuss a new type of software system for mapping and managing a cloud service.

Any non-trivial business application is a composite application (Figure 1). For example, a J2EE online ordering application might include plain-old-Java-objects (POJOs) implementing business logic, database stored procedures, portlets for the web UI, business rules to compute pricing and discounts, and a set of BPEL workflows for business processes (order processing, new product definition, etc). Slightly more complex composite applications typically include legacy applications (e.g. mainframe COBOL programs) and multiple technologies (e.g. ASP .NET, J2EE, CGI in C, PHP). Business transactions/end-to-end requests flows through the application components, for example, submit shopping cart.

Figure 1: Composite Application (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb220803.aspx)

A composite application requires a composite IT system (Figure 2: Composite IT System/IT Supply Chain). A composite IT system is an interconnected set of hardware and software resources that run and implement the composite application. The composite IT system may include:

• Middleware:
• Application servers: Tomcat, WebSphere, SAP NetWeaver, Microsoft Internet Information Services, JBoss, etc.
• Portal/Collaboration Servers: Liferay, Drupal, etc.
• Message Queuing, Event and Enterprise Service Buses: WebSphere/MQ, ActiveMQ, etc.
• Database Servers: Oracle, MySQL, etc.
• Operating Systems (e.g. Linux, Windows) and infrastructure software
  (e.g. Hypervisors, server daemons, Linux, Windows Server.)
• Physical Hardware, including network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), router, rack mounted/blade server farms, etc.

 
Figure 2: Composite IT System/IT Supply Chain

The composite application and supporting composite IT system implement an IT service. The IT service partially realizes a business service, which includes non-IT resources (physical documents, trucks, branches, etc, people and non-automated processes and policies.

The current approach to delivering IT services deploys virtually all of the hardware and software resources “in the data center”—either run by the enterprise or provided by a hosting/outsourcing company. This approach to IT is similar to vertically integrated manufacturing with all resources (factories, warehouses, manufacturing devices, etc.) inside the enterprise, and often in a small number of large factories.

Cloud computing for business applications optimizes applications and agility for new applications by mapping application and system elements to cloud service providers, producing a cloud-spanning application. The next blog entry will discuss the concept in more detail.