SOA is Dead; Long Live Services

It's been all over the technical news for the last few days and it won't fail to stir up quite a few heated discussions: it's of course Anne Thomas Manes' article SOA is Dead; Long Live Services [1].

It is indeed very interesting. But as Stefan Tilkov comments on Infoq [2]:

In all fairness, Anne seems to object to the word SOA, not necessarily the concept, because it seems to have lost its meaning for many people.

[1] http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html

[2] http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/is-soa-dead

Under new supervision

With Panos leaving academia and joining Microsoft to pursue his career in the industry, Nick has kindly accepted to step in to replace him as my supervisor for the last year of my PhD.

I'm looking forward to working with Nick. His work is an inspiration (Nick's thesis is one of the best I've read) and I hope we'll be successful working together.

What is Cloud?

After hearing so much about Cloud Computing [1], a few months ago I decided to find my own answers...

You can find these in this document: What is Cloud? [2] Named after the famous “What is Grid? A three point check” [3]. I don't expect my document to reach such a high level of visibility, but it might start a few discussions...

Following is a short teaser:
I start by introducing distributed computing and Grid because, frankly said; I didn't think there was anything new in Cloud. However, the principal points I’m trying to make in this document are:
We’ve reached such a high level of complexity and size in distributed systems that more and more tasks should be managed automatically.
Computing resources are not only the usual data or processor time anymore, but could be anything.

I’ll follow the discussions over on wiki and in the different events I’ll attend because these two points are at the base of my work.

More on this later as I am working on some exiting stuff related to Cloud and security…(did I hear security in Cloud computing?!).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
[2] http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/pierre.de-leusse/files/whatIsCloud.pdf
[3] http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/Articles/WhatIsTheGrid.pdf

Highlands roadtrip

Following AHM [1], Anna and I went on a roadtrip in the highlands. From Edinburgh to Inverness, followed by Gairloch, Ullapool and Stoer (amongst other destinations). It was a blast, we saw so many nice things like seals, baskin sharks or wonderfull landscapes...still 641 miles (1000km+) in 4 days is a lot.

We're both looking forward to go there again!

[1] http://de-leusse.blogspot.com/2008/09/uk-e-science-all-hands-meeting-2008.html

Committee

It's now official, I'm member of the technical committee for the MESH 2009 event. This year's event was a blast, both in term of content, with some interesting work presented, and in term of networking with amazing researchers from a lot of big companies (Siemens, Nokia, Cisco, Thales, Atos Orgin...) and universities.

I got to know Andreas and Marcel, and I'm please to see they're both committees as well. I'm looking forward to more interaction with them.

Finally, a little advertising for my own paper :) Secure & Rapid Composition of Infrastructure Services in the Cloud (here).

UK e-Science ALL HANDS MEETING 2008

Last week I was present at the AHM in Edinburgh. Amongst other cool things were talks from Andrew Martin and from Ross Anderson. Andrew's defence of the fact that security specialists should work together to come up with practical solutions (e.g. patterns, guidelines, scenarios) rather than work in their own corner was spot on.

The AssessGrid project demo along with the poster by Karim Djemame were also interesting. I'm working on similar issues of negotiation of non functional properties and I hope to have the chance to discuss more of this with Karim in the futur.

John and Paul's talks [1, 2] went well and it was good to see what they've been up to in more details.

Finally, my talk [3] went rather well, although I was disapointed by the low attendence.

[1] A Peer-to-Peer Database Server based on BitTorrent
[2] An Adaptive Distributed Query Processor for e-Science using Dynamic Service Deployment
[3] A semi autonomic infrastructure to manage non functional properties of a service

Exploits of a mum

This SQL injection joke makes me laugh...Plus I wouldn't be surprised if that would really happen.

ESB : Technical Report

It's been a very long time since my last post, but I found the motivation to start again. To let you know that I authored a technical report on ESB. You can find this one here (http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/abstract/1037).

Please feel free to comment here or send me an email if you have any comment or suggestion. Following is the abstract:

Currently, business requirements for rapid operational efficiency, customer responsiveness as well as rapid adaptability are driving the need for ever increasing communication and integration capabilities of the software assets. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), which is the process of integrating enterprise systems with existing applications and in general distributed computing, have produced diverse integration techniques and approaches to undertake these challenges. This has brought the development of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) variants, which is partly supported by commonly accepted standards that ensure interoperability, sharing and reusability. As a result of this, a safer and faster level of return on investment (ROI) can be generated while inter-software communication and integration has becomes ever easier. In this paper we discuss ESB and evaluate the concept against already existing broker architectures and paradigms.

SOA Acronyms

The more I read about SOA related topics, the more buzz words and acronyms I encounter. I therefore decided to try to list these and to share them here.

Disclaim: Due to their plethoric number, all acronyms won’t necessarily be covered by this list or one meaning could have been missed. I will be more then pleased to add anybody's participation if I receive a correction/addition with the source(s) where it can be found.

AAP: Attribute Assignment Policy

AC: Assertion Certificates

ACP: Access Control Policy

ACRL: Assertion Certificates Revocation List



B2B: Business to Business

BAM: Business Activity Monitoring

BPEL: Business Process Execution Language

BPEL4WS: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

BPM: Business Process Management

BPSS: Business Process Specification Schema



CA: Certification Authority

CBR: Content Base Routing

COM: Component Object Model

CVS: Credential Validation Service



DIS: Delegation Issuing Service

DN: Distinguished Name

DSL: Domain Specific Languages



EAI: Enterprise Application Integration

ebXML: Electronic Business XML

EDI: Electronic Data Interchange

EIM: Enterprise Integration Management

ELT: Extract, Transform and Load

ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning

ESB: Enterprise Service Bus



GGF: Global Grid Forum

GSI: Global Security Infrastructure



HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol



IP: Integration Platform



JAXB: Java Architecture for XML Binding

JAXP: Java API for XML Parsing

JBI: Java Business Integration

JCA: Java Connector Architecture

JCP: Java Community Process

JMS: Java Message Service

JMX: Java Management eXtension



MEP: Message Exchange Pattern

MQ: Message Queue

MQB: Message Queue Broker

MOM: Message Oriented Middleware

MSMQ: Microsoft Message Queuing



PDP: Policy Decision Point

PEP: Policy Enforcement Point

PKI: Public Key Infrastructure



RBAC: Role Based Access Control

RFC: Remote Function Call



SAML: Security Assertion Markup Language

SecPal: Security Policy Assertion Language

SLA: Service Level Agreement

SoA: Source of Authority

SOA: Service Oriented Architecture

SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol (depreciated)

SP: Service Provider

SSDL: SOAP Service Description Language

SSL: Secure Socket Layer

SSO: Single SignOn

STP: Straight Through Processing



TCO: Total Cost of Ownership

TTP: Trusted Third Party



UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration



VAN: Value Added Network

VETO: Validate, Enrich, Transform and Operate

VO: Virtual Organisation

VOMS: Virtual Organisation Management System



WS: Web Service

WSDL: Web Service Description Language

WSN: Web Services Networks



XACML: eXtensible Access Control Markup Language

XML: eXtensible Markup Language

XML-RPC: XML Remote Procedure Call

XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language

XSLT: Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

Enterprise Service Bus

ESB Has been the focus of my interest (maybe even a bit too much) recently. I will try to keep up to date with its actuallity (yes ESB are still being looked at) and list here the most interesting materials I've found.

- brief introduction on the topic on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus).

- practical and concise book: Enterprise Service Bus from David A. Chapell (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esb/index.html).