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From the Editors: Keep watching the clouds


By SD Times News Team
December 1, 2008 — 
Rapid innovation is under way in cloud computing, with new companies joining the fray seemingly every week. Some are refining existing approaches, some have new ideas and some are “me too.” While it’s good to keep up with the newcomers—and to try out their offerings, where it makes sense—the rapid pace of innovation means it’s too soon for a large-scale adoption. Not only don’t we know which providers will be around for the long term, but we also don’t know which of their many business models and architectures will prove to be successful.

It’s certainly true that first movers have an advantage. But they don’t have all the advantages.

In the early days of the automotive industry, Ford’s Model T was the first vehicle affordable to the masses, and it popularized a new form of transportation. Soon afterward, other car companies followed suit with better components and offered consumers greater choice, while Ford’s design remained largely static. Although it was first out the gate, Ford did not have an insurmountable advantage.

We’re not saying that Amazon’s cloud platform is a Model T. Far from it. But just because the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud was the first successful cloud offering doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. Alternatives are cropping up, and they deserve serious attention.

Take Azure. While Microsoft insists that it is a partner—not a competitor—to Amazon, Microsoft has created a full-fledged development platform for cloud services. There’s a lot more work to be done, but Microsoft clearly has the resources to turn Azure into a very robust platform.

The same can be said for Google and its platform. Meanwhile, certain more vertically focused companies, such as Salesforce.com, have resources to cycle into broad-based cloud platform development. Numerous cloud startups are cropping up as well.

This is the time to test the cloud-computing waters at a project level. If everyone had jumped at once at the dawn of the auto industry, we would all still be driving Model Ts.

SOAP and (not vs.) REST
There is a time and a place for every protocol, and for every protocol suite. Some competitive protocols lose during a shakeout to a better-designed, or better-funded, alternative. SOAP and REST, by contrast, are settling into a peaceful coexistence. It appears to us likely that both protocol suites will survive, at least for a few more Internet years.

SOAP, with its WS-* additions, makes the Internet and the Web viable for reliable network transactions. REST, on the other hand, is dead simple and requires no extra tooling.

Both have their place. SOAP is already the basis for many of the SOA architectures deployed in enterprises. It’s mature enough to instill confidence in the software that uses it, and thus it’s the de facto choice for many large professional products.

REST, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to the agile program model, wherein Web applications are written in hours, not days, and everything is a service. Google Maps is an excellent example of RESTful design: You hand it a URL with all the location data encoded, and in a few moments you receive the corresponding map. Anyone who’s worked a Google-hosted map into a Web page knows how quick and easy it can be to insert such content.

Of course, there’s always a chance the embedded map might come back empty, or severely delayed. When trying to troubleshoot such problems, REST can become a burden since it lacks a direct method for debugging or reliability, short of dumping Apache logs into Splunk.

This is why there’s room for two in the Web services future. WS-*/SOAP and REST are perfectly suited to their audiences. It’s generally clear which to pick, and for which projects. We like it that way.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, REST, SOAP, Amazon, Google, Microsoft


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