Bridging the Gap between Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Software as a Service

Abstract

Nowadays, Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have received increased attention as approaches to software development in distributed systems. Cloud SaaS is the most common model in cloud computing that provides software as service over internet to support the availability and scalability of services. While SOA is an architectural style that focuses on loosely coupled interaction between services to provide the reusability. In SaaS model, applications suffer from functions customization and reusability. On the other hand, SOA architecture suffers from many scalability issues. There is a need for a new model that tackle these issues. This research aims to bridge the gap between SOA and SaaS through designing a new model as an attempt to combine SOA and SaaS in one model and then leverage from SOA reusability and SaaS scalability. The proposed model has the structure of SaaS multi-tenant’s applications with modified in computing and application code structure by applying the SOA concepts. The research followed an empirical study and case study methodology. The evaluation is carried out through designing a healthcare information system based on the proposed model. According to the evaluation results, the implementation of the proposed model on healthcare information system has increased the reusability and scalability of system.