Reconciling Service Orientation with the Cloud

The SaaS market is growing steadily. In the face of it, SaaS providers have started to reflect on how to rationalize their internal processes: service design, management and delivery. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles can offer valuable insight in that process as the SOA concept has several key traits in common with the cloud computing paradigm. The latter however gives prominence to the economics of the SaaS application delivery, which values elasticity in the sharing of resources and in the preservation of service-level agreements, characteristics which the former prospective ignored. This work continues on the trail of previous research on service-oriented cloud platforms, by presenting a new enriched SOA paradigm that embraces rapid elasticity, in conformance with the postulates of cloud computing. The integration of our SOA-based PaaS prototype, PaaSSOA, with a real IaaS instance, Amazon Web Services, provides an initial confirmation of the viability of the extended notion of service model, as well as empirical evidence that a SOA-based PaaS can effectively operate over a real IaaS instance.