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I am speaking this afternoon at OSCON on Building Applications Across the Cloud and Enterprise Using Mule. SOA and virtualization play critical roles in enabling cloud computing and an ESB can help to bridge the chasm between traditional enterprise technologies and cloud-based infrastructure and services.

In preparing my presentation, I discovered several things:

  • Cloud Computing services can be broken into three distinct layers – Infrastructure, Platform, and Applications
  • Cloud Computing has specific strengths and weaknesses that need to be considered before starting a project
  • SLAs vary greatly between cloud service providers and need to be scrutinized, along with the viability of the provider
  • While protocols are standardized, formats and APIs are highly proprietary
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Mule is relevant for all these points. An ESB can assist with integrating cloud-based applications running in both virtualized environments like Amazon EC2 as well as cloud platforms like Google App Engine and SalesForce Force.com. Also, with web 2.0 and the explosion of applications and services running in the cloud and accessible via APIs, Mule's breadth of protocol support and data transformation capabilities open these up to be tightly integrated with existing services running inside the firewall. By interfacing your applications through the ESB, you can isloate proprietary APIs and data formats using custom transports developed for these services. Many of these are available today on the MuleForge.