Comparative Analysis of SOA and Cloud Computing Architectures Using Fact Based Modeling

With the ever-changing dynamic Information and Communications Technology environment and the new shared deployment options for computing, a paradigm shift is occurring that enables ubiquitous and convenient computing on a pay-as-you-go basis. Access on demand is becoming available to networks of scalable, elastic, self-serviceable, configurable physical and virtual resources. On a more narrowly focused IT and business front, there is a parallel shift towards designing information systems in terms of the services available at an interface. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development style is based on the design of services and processes and the realization of interoperability and location transparency in context-specific implementations. This paper analyzes the Cloud Computing and SOA Reference Architectures being developed by ISO ISO/IEC JTC1 SC38 (in collaboration with ITU-T SG13/WP6 for Cloud Computing), and offers a concept comparison using Fact Based Modeling (FBM) methodology. FBM has allowed us to distill the concepts, relationships and business rules - thereby exposing the strengths and weakness of each, and identifying the gaps between the two.