Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 3. ENRICHING THE 'INTEGRATION AS A SERVICE' PARADIGM FOR THE CLOUD ERA

PETHURU RAJ

AN INTRODUCTION

The trend-setting cloud paradigm actually represents the cool conglomeration of a number of proven and promising Web and enterprise technologies. Though the cloud idea is not conceptually new, practically it has brought in myriad tectonic shifts for the whole information and communication technology (ICT) industry. The cloud concepts have progressively and perceptibly impacted the IT and business domains on several critical aspects. The cloud computing has brought in series of novelty-packed deployment, delivery, consumption and pricing models whereas the service orientation prescribes a much simpler application design mechanism. The noteworthy contribution of the much-discoursed and deliberated cloud computing is the faster realization and proliferation of dynamic, converged, adaptive, on-demand, and online compute infrastructures, which are the key requirement for the future IT. The delightful distinctions here are that clouds guarantee most of the non-function requirements (Quality of Service (QoS) attributes) such as availability, high performance, on-demand scalability/elasticity, affordability, global-scale accessibility and usability, energy efficiency etc.

Having understood the exceptional properties of cloud infrastructures (hereafter will be described as just clouds), most of the global enterprises (small, medium and even large) are steadily moving their IT offerings ...