Service Oriented Infrastructure or SOI provides a system for describing
information technology (IT)
infrastructure
Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...
as a
service
Service may refer to:
Activities
* Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty
* Civil service, the body of employees of a government
* Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a pu ...
. The underlying principles go back to, among others,
Mainframe
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...
and
LDAP technologies; SOI provides a framework or mindset for making
business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...
benefits measurable.
Overview
A service-oriented infrastructure provides a foundation for IT services. A concept initially developed by Intel discussed three domains for
service-orientation:
# the enterprise
# the
application architecture
# the infrastructure
This article covers the infrastructure domain of service-orientation. Key aspects of service-oriented infrastructure include
industrialisation
Industrialisation ( alternatively spelled industrialization) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive re-organisation of an econo ...
and virtualisation, providing IT infrastructure services via a pool of resources (web servers, application servers, database servers, servers, storage instances) instead of through discrete instances.
While the
IT industry has widely adopted
service-oriented architecture (SOA), service-oriented infrastructure or SOI has lagged in its adoption. This has changed with the availability of SOI solutions like
application-server grids, database grids, Virtualised
servers and
virtualised storage.
A joint effort between
HP,
Cisco and
Capgemini has resulted in the following definition for a service-oriented infrastructure:
* a virtualised IT infrastructure with components managed in an industrialised way and which:
** expose a catalog of services instead of discrete instances
** can comprise service-oriented architecture application support
The term SOI also has a broader usage, which includes all configurable infrastructure resources such as compute, storage, and networking hardware and software to support the running of applications. Consistent with the objectives for SOA, SOI facilitates the reuse and dynamic allocation of necessary infrastructure resources. The development of SOI solutions focuses around the service characteristics envisaged. The service characteristics provide the basis both for the development as well as for the delivery of the services. The notion of a fully managed life cycle of the services envisages a continuum that contrasts with the event-based deployment of IT infrastructure that provided discrete silos of IT infrastructure for specific applications.
A SOI exposes a set of fundamental services such as mobility or security which form a part of the network environment that can deliver resource sharing, application integration, and communications and collaboration: ubiquitously, scalably, reliably, sustainably, maintainably and cost-effectively. In order to ensure each service provides a standard response to a standard invocation at all times, the service must include a control process. The control process measures both the demand and the supply of a capability and automatically updates the capability if required.
In April 2007
The Open Group started a project on SOI
[
]
within its SOA Working Group. This SOI project aims to develop more common understanding around SOI between the members of The Open Group.
Orchestrating virtualised components
Service orientation provides significant advantages for IT infrastructure services. The main benefits include increased utilisation of individual resources (meaning lower
total cost of ownership) and increased service-levels as applications do not depend on the availability of any individual resource, but may use any one resource available in the pool.
, available IT infrastructure technologies provide a full stack of options to deliver an end-to-end service-oriented service. Schedulers can virtualise each service within this domain, and a highly automated provisioning process can manage the required number of resources constituting a service, thus ensuring standard quality and consistent behaviour of the infrastructure services. This applies to servers, storage, networks, directory services, databases: in fact to every component of the IT infrastructure.
See also
*
Service Oriented Architecture
*
Grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...
*
Amazon Web Services
Further reading
*
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Footnotes
{{reflist
Service-oriented (business computing)