The Rise of Virtual Service Grids
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Join For FreeThe concept of virtualization and sharing of resources is not a new one. In fact, the idea of standardization has been around since the industrial revolution made it possible to mass produce identical parts. Because of this, manufacturing and production costs declined steeply, as businesses no longer needed to specialize in every aspect of production. And now, the same idea is being applied in the information age. Virtualization and service orientation are allowing businesses to share or sell common components to allow for faster and cheaper development times. This article discusses the way service-orientation came about, and provides a brief overview of what it can offer.
This article authored by Enrique Castro-leon, Jackson He, Mark Chang and Parviz Peiravi and published at SOA Magazine on February 2009.
Service Integration
The
industrial revolution of the nineteenth century led to the pervasive
replacement of manual labor with steel-based machinery powered by coal
technology. The visible icons of this revolution are Thomas Newcomen
and James Watt with their improvements to the steam engine design.
One
aspect that has received little attention is the role of the underlying
industrial processes. Railway robber barons did not start from ground
zero; they were able to build their empires without having to own coal
or iron mines, or having deep knowledge about the extraction
technologies. Different grades of steel with known properties became
available to build locomotives and steam engines. Manufacturing became
more efficient due to a number of standards. Standardized screw sizes
in nuts and bolts made these parts interchangeable not only lowered the
cost of building the railroad infrastructure, but also made possible
the large scale production of firearms that the tycoons needed to
defend their lairs.
A
similar transformation is happening with the information technology
industry. This transformation is being driven by the synergistic
interaction of three technologies: virtualization, service orientation
and grid computing. As in the industrial revolution, this trio of
technologies allows an efficient division of labor. The payoff of this
efficiency comes in reduced cost of the delivery of IT services and in
their reach across market segments and across geographies. IT services
will no longer be the exclusive privilege of large organizations that
can afford a sizable in house IT organization; these services will be
affordable to small businesses and even individual consumers, and not
only in advanced economies but also in developing countries across the
world.
There
are three essential components that drive an IT service: the
application that defines the service, the data providing the user
context, and the computing engines that power the application. Sixty
years ago all the pieces were tightly integrated: software was custom
built for a specific target machine, and data was essentially an
appendage of the code. The industrial evolution analog would be a
locomotive manufacturer having to mine the iron ore, doing materials
research, making the different kinds of steel and even machining the
bolts. This would be an expensive proposition. Since bolts would be
unique, the user would be forced to purchase replacement bolts from the
locomotive manufacturer. Industries in their initial stages tend to be
vertically integrated in this manner, and their products are expensive,
limiting their market reach.
It
is useful to draw an analogy with a mature industry to see this pattern
at work. Let's look at the processes used by an automobile insurance
company with national coverage to fix a fender bender for a client. The
process is illustrated in the figure below.
Figure 1 |
|

Most mature industries have become service integrators taking advantage of pre-existing services. It would be foolish for a car insurance company wishing to build national coverage to start building a network of car repair shops. Car insurance companies avail themselves of existing car repair shops, and it would be preposterous to think otherwise.

Yet when we think about IT for a large organization, we don't think twice about hundreds of millions of dollars spent in vertically integrated infrastructure, tens of thousands of square feet in huge data centers housing thousands of servers, many of them performing no more than file serving functions and most of the time woefully underutilized.

Under this state of affairs IT is not as efficient as it could be. Not only is IT expensive; there are scalability issues: only well capitalized companies can afford this capability while small businesses are underserved.

Process, Technology Innovation and Virtual Service Grids
Actually, from a historical perspective, the patterns characterizing the evolution of IT over the years are not that much different from those in more mature industries. The cycle time to implement and deliver a business application has been steadily decreasing over the past fifty years; from several years at the dawn of computing to a few weeks or faster today. This pattern is not abating for the foreseeable future.

The acceleration comes from the use of pre-built components and our ability to schedule data, applications and compute engines separately, sourcing these resources to the places and methods of lowest cost. Essentially, process innovation accelerates the time it takes to assemble an application or solution to a business problem. The graph below depicts this evolution over the most recent six decades of computer history. In the 1950s developing an application required architecting the computer that went with it, a process that took several years. In the 1960 the application would involve software only, using a compiled language, and the process took in the order two or three years. The introduction of static and run time libraries, packaged software, object oriented methods, Web services and today service oriented methods and cloud environments have brought exponential improvements in time to solution. Plotted against a logarithmic scale, these improvements show as a straight line of continuous improvement:
Figure 2 |
|



Figure 3 |
|
Figure 3 |
Figure 4 |
Advances in IT process innovation increase the speed at
which a solution can be brought to market, while technology innovation
increases the capability of a solution: it can make it more affordable
and therefore useful to a broader market, or can increase performance.
The graph contains a sampling of technologies.
We have singled out three representative technologies, virtualization,
SOA and computing grids, which, when applied in a coordinated fashion,
enable the delivery of IT solutions that can be assembled faster than
traditional applications and at a remarkable lower cost. Examples of
solutions developed in this fashion are mash-ups and most cloud-based
applications. These solutions are said to be representative of virtual
service grids or VSGs for short. The efficiency from assembling and
operating VSG solutions come from two mechanisms: decoupling and late
binding.
Decoupling means resources can be scheduled separately and in parallel.
The traditional provisioning of a server, the action of uncrating the
machine, updating the firmware, installing the OS, virtualization layer
and applications represents a series of interdependent tasks. A delay
in any of the tasks delays the whole operation. The fact that each task
can be completed only after the precedent task is complete represents a
serial bottleneck.
Late
binding means many resource decisions can be postponed, some until
right before deployment. The benefit it brings is agility and
flexibility. Early binding means a decision needs to be locked in early
during a project. The risk here is that a wrong choice early on can
result in significant project rework and time impact.
In
a VSG environment applications are seldom built by coding them from
scratch, but by composing more elemental services. We call these
elemental services servicelets.
Web services would be the technology of choice for binding servicelets
into full fledged applications. As such, servicelets are invoked
through a discoverable Web services API. Servicelets can be recycled
legacy applications exposed through a middleware layer or written from
scratch. An example of a servicelet would be a module for performing
credit card transactions, such as the one provided by the PayPal Web
service.
Cloud
computing is an instance of a VSG environment that is the subject of
intense interest in the industry. For instance, Amazon's Simple Storage
Service or S3 is essentially a storage servicelet.
Applications
can be built from a mixture of in-house and externally provided
servicelets. Servicelets providing generic services can be procured
more economically through an external provider, barring security
considerations.
An analysis for the adoption dynamics of servicelets leads to the
inside-out and outside-in paradigms for SOA adoption [REF-2].
In a VSG environment the solution integrator has a choice of a number
of services already up and running to assemble a target application.
The service provider already has taken the hit for the serialized
provisioning process, or the cost of any development involved. This
cost is amortized over multiple service instances, and hence the
overall effect is a cost reduction for the industry as a whole, which
brings the subject of other people's systems.
Other People's Money versus Other People's Systems
Scaling
a business often involves OPM (other people's money), through
partnerships or issuing of stock through IPOs (initial public
offerings). These relationships are carried out within a legal
framework that took hundreds of years to develop.
In the real world, scaling a computing system follows a similar
approach, in the form of resource outsourcing, such as using other
people's systems or OPS. The use of OPS has a strong economic
incentive: it does not make sense to spend millions of dollars in a
large data center only to operate these assets at very low load
factors, oftentimes in the single digits.
Virtualization
breaks the traditional binding between an application and its physical
host. A software application stack is now embodied in a virtual
machine, represented as a file that can be run on any physical host
with a hypervisor. Multiple virtual machines can be allocated to a host
to optimize the host's workload.
The
application of service oriented principles brings a highly
interoperable framework that facilitates the reuse of these resources.
Service orientation technology also decouples the binding between data
and applications, so at least in principle, users will have a choice
among a number of application service instances from a variety of
software vendors.
Finally,
grid computing brings a tradition of dynamic, real-time resource
allocation. An environment with full fledged use of OPS, where
computing resources are traded like commodities in a vibrant and
dynamic ecosystem, is not a reality today. Such infrastructure requires
a sophisticated technical and legal infrastructure not yet available.
This infrastructure is needed to handle service level agreements
(SLAs), privacy, ensuring that intellectual property (IP) and trade
secrets do not leak from the system, as well as user, system, and
performance management, billing, and other administrative procedures.
Conclusion
The
changes brought by virtual service grid technology will likely
transform the information industry in ways that are difficult to fathom
from our present day vantage point. We are essentially at an inflection
point defined by two forces: the transition from an up front investment
model for IT requiring large capital outlays to a pay-as-you-go model.
Market elasticity dictates that when price points go down, demand
increases, partly due to pent-up needs, but perhaps more so because new
entrants enter the field who could not afford to play before. This
means increasing participation by the members of the "long tail" of
cloud computing: small businesses, emerging markets and even
individuals coming up with a great idea.
Second,
the acceleration of the time it takes to build an application by orders
of magnitude means the evolutionary process gets accelerated by the
same rate. The evolutionary refinement of hundreds of generations
taking place in the same time it took to develop a traditional
application is mind boggling.
References
[REF-1]
"The Business Value of Virtual Service Oriented Grids" by Enrique
Castro-leon, Jackson He, Mark Chang and Parviz Peiravi, Intel Press
(2008), ISBN 978-1934053102.
[REF-2] "Scaling Down SOA to Small Businesses", IEEE Int'l
Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (June 2007)
pp.99-106.
This article is based on material found in book "The Business Value
of Virtual Service-Oriented Grids" (October, 2008) by Enrique
Castro-leon, Jackson He, Mark Chang and Parviz Peiravi. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted
under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act,
without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or
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Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923,
(978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for
permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Intel Press, Intel
Corporation, 2111 NE 25 Avenue, JF3-330, Hillsboro, OR 97124-5961.
E-mail: intelpress@intel.com.
This article was originally published in The SOA Magazine (www.soamag.com), a publication officially associated with "The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl" (www.soabooks.com). Copyright ©SOA Systems Inc. (www.soasystems.com)
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