Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the cloud complement each other and at the same time are in different stages of their lifecycles. At WSO2Con 2011, Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO, led a panel to discuss three aspects of these technology approaches. First was an examination of SOA, which has been through the hype cycle and out the other side, and how hindsight here might help understand cloud computing. Second, was to examine the interaction between SOA and the cloud, and third was to look to the future and what is next. Joining Mr. Fremantle were panelists Sastry Malladi, eBay distinguished architect; Brad Svee, Concur Technologies senior manager of IT development and engineering; Narendra Nathmal, Cognizant Technologies Advanced SOA Center of Excellence chief architect; and Afkam Azeez, WSO2 director of architecture. Here are highlights from their discussion. Moderator: Paul Fremantle, Panelists: Sastry Malladi, Afkham Azeez, Brad Svee, Narendra Nathmal

It has been said that data has a value that will last much longer than the systems it runs on. Today that data is more diverse than ever, whether it’s coming from Google, Facebook, RFID tags, GPS devices, or traditional applications. The challenge to effectively store, manage and access all these forms of information has in turn spawned a correspondingly diverse range of data storage and management technologies. At WSO2Con 2011, Dr. Srinath Perera, WSO2 senior software architect, led a panel to address two primary questions. How can we store data at a time when we are no longer talking about 10MB but instead 10TB? And how do we make sense of all the information we are collecting? Joining Dr. Perera were panelists Dr. C. Mohan, IBM research fellow; Gregor Hohpe, Google engineer; and Sumedha Rubasinghe, WSO2 architect and senior manager. Here are highlights from their discussion. Moderator: Dr. Srinath Perera, Panelists: Dr. C. Mohan, Gregor Hohpe, Sumedha Rubasinghe

Fellow architects and designers, I fear that we as an industry are moving our applications and data into the cloud without first having mastered service-oriented architecture, the basic discipline of building distributed systems. In the process, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) compliments infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings by providing middleware products as services to enable application development and integration in the cloud. However, not all PaaS approaches are the same. Many only support Web application development, and only a few can support complex enterprise applications in the cloud. In his presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Shankar explored cloud-native benefits, such as self-provisioning, multi-tenancy, elasticity and metering, and he used the WSO2 StratosLive PaaS to demonstrate how to build complex SOA applications for the cloud. Here are highlights from his talk. About the Speaker Shankar joined WSO2 in September 2007 and works as a Senior Software Architect and Senior Manager. He currently works on Stratos, Axis2/C, WSF projects and interoperability.

Increasingly, enterprises are turning to the cloud as a cost-effective way to extend the reach of their applications. However, Gartner forecasts that vendors will not have true, integrated and complete middleware platforms and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) frameworks until 2015. In his presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Azeez explored basic cloud middleware platform and PaaS principles, using WSO2 Stratos and WSO2 StratosLive as examples. About the Speaker Azeez joined WSO2 in December 2005 and currently works in the capacity of Director, Architecture. He is an elected Member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and also a Project Management Committee (PMC) member and committer on a number of projects at ASF.