Application-Specific Cloud Platforms

Abstract

A number of events in IT practices paved the way to the adoption of the cloud we see today. One of them took place primarily in large organizations: the service-oriented architecture (SOA) transformation between the turn of the century and 2007, in which application silos were broken up into loosely coupled reusable service components (servicelets) linked by web services or RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs). This is the transformation described in the Uber and Netflix case studies in Chapter 4. IT became modular, with the servicelet as a unit of composition. We look at the notion of application-specific cloud platform (ASCP) as the hardware platform that runs this new environment.