Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I was provided a review copy of this book by the publisher free of charge. From the back cover: “Cloud Computing as SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise offers a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges associated with this new world–and offers a step-by-step program for getting there with maximum return on investment and minimum risk.”

My review in a nutshell: This is a very well-written, easy-to-read book, targeted at IT managers, that provides a robust overview of Cloud Computing and its relationship to SOA, and the core basics of a game plan for leveraging it.

This book was an extremely easy read, which is to be expected of any book from Dave, based upon the easy to read style of his InfoWorld blog. He provides a taxonomy of cloud offerings, extending the typical three categories (Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to eleven. While some may think eleven is too many, the fact remains that a taxonomy is necessary as a core starting point, and Dave provides solid definitions for each category that an organization can choose to use. He goes on to provide a financial model to consider for making your cloud decisions, but correctly states that cost is only one factor in the decision making process. He provides the other dimensions that should be associated with your decision making process in equal detail. In chapters 5 through 10, he walks through steps associated with moving services, data, processes, governance, and testing into a cloud environment. Dave’s steps for these chapters are very straightforward. That being said, Dave does not sugarcoat the fact that these steps are not always easy to do, and your success (or lack of it) is highly dependent on how large of a domain you choose to attack.

For someone who has researched SOA and Cloud Computing in detail, this book may not provide a lot of new information, but what it does provide, is a straightforward process for organizing your effort and making progress. Often times, that can be the biggest challenge. For this reason, I do think the book is more geared toward the management side of IT, and less so toward the technical side (architects and developers), but as an architect, I did find the taxonomies presented valuable. The only area for improvement that I saw would have been a stronger emphasis on the role the service model must play in the selection process, and stronger emphasis on having service managers inside your IT organization. Dave discussed both of these topics, however, to make stronger ties between SOA and Cloud Computing (or even ITIL and Cloud Computing), these points could have been emphasized more strongly. Choosing the right cloud provider requires that you have solid requirements on what you need, which comes from your service model. Ensuring that your requirements continue to be met and don’t get transformed into what the service provider would prefer to offer requires solid service management on your side.

Any cloud computing initiative will require that everyone involved have a base level of understanding of the goals to be achieved and the process for doing it. This book can help your staff gain that base understanding.

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