Virtualization and SOA

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Virtualization and SOA have a indirect yet complementary relationship. Perhaps the biggest plus of using both in an IT and business transformation role, is that virtualization helps show faster return on investment (ROI) for deployment infrastructure. And that infrastructure can support many services and SOA assets efficiently, which should encourage increased use of SOA. That is, virtualization can increase utilization rates of services deployment environments, cut total costs for services deployment, and by association then cut total costs for SOA.

But strictly speaking, SOA is about design time composite applications and processes agility benefits, while virtualization is about runtime deployment efficiency and provisioning ease benefits. As organizations move to SOA they will seek a services lifecycle management approach, which may include a call for virtualized containers as runtimes for services, data, and even SOA infrastructure itself (such as virtualized software appliances). At some point, the dynamic demand on services will be accommodated automatically through newly provisioned instances of services in virtualized containers.

But for now, virtualization and SOA are orthogonal, and will probably be embraced by different aspects of IT and at uncoordinated rates. There is increased complexity and still insufficient visibility into how virtualized containers would allow for strict performance management of services. More needs to be done to ensure that the cost benefits of virtualization is not outweighed by lack of management and ability to determine root causes of slowdowns or failures in a distributed services containers environment.

For now, use virtualization to reduce server platform overhead, modernize applications to make them able to be virtualized well, and then deconstruct those applications into services. Soon it will makes sense to then run more of those services in a virtualized grid or utility runtime environment.