Clouds of Quantum Machines

Background: Services And Clouds In A Contemporary Approach

Services are cybernetic replicas of human practices, being evoked by well-established environmental motivations. In turn, SOA is an architecture that integrates in a standard manner several service units, each of them sending their features as sets of tasks over the network. Only service interfaces are exposed to consumers as exported methods (Nakamura et al., 2004). Therefore, when services are requested, SOA seeks the best responses to those environmental motivations according to the internal logic of each service. In particular, this architecture is now strongly linked to the theme of “enterprise application integration” (EAI) in contexts where legacy applications already established are performed on different platforms.

The literature on SOA comprises several milestone contributions as the works of Nakamura et al. (2004), Erl (2005), Anderson & Ciruli (2006), Natis (2007), Sha (2007) and, markedly, Frenken et al. (2008) about device-level service deployment. On this latter subject, it is noteworthy that, in the process of architectural development, devices which access legacy applications are created and interact using a protocol defined by the system. In turn, the system returns the aggregated information from the various legacy applications, preferably without any additional code. The architectural development also takes care of the service interface, prescribing the information required to access the competences of that. It is worth remembering that the existence of interfaces and descriptions of accessibility is sine qua non for the implementation of SOA. More recent works show the state-of-art in services orchestration (MEF Forum, 2015; Lemos et al., 2015).

In SOA projects, the so-called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is thought to be the main component of the infrastructure layer. It is the mediator between provider and service consumers, and its responsibility is to provide integration and interoperability between different systems. Embedded in this responsibility is also the mission of cleaning the databases by a service that tracks and recognizes all of the systems which shall be linked. Connectors are created in the databases feeding a new datawarehouse completely normalized, such that any updates made on the original basis are automatically computed and reflected in the standardized repository.