Cloud Computing
Oh my it has been a while since I have made any comment on here - sorry guys.

I have been in the midst of executing several strategic recommendations which is a pleasure in itself as often strategies are written but not funded for execution. The one recommendation I wanted to discuss today was cloud computing and for us it is focused upon infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

As a service provider entering this market we decided to see what the vendors had to offer and started with a reference architecture. This was a great tool to really get our heads around what technology was important and what was not. We had four key domains:
1) Resources
2) Resource Management
3) Service Management
4) Access Management

Surprisingly (and maybe I shouldn't have been surprised) three of the domains were software and only one hardware - for IaaS I was definitely expecting it to be hardware focused. To deliver cloud well you need to sophisticated tools, whether you are doing private cloud within your enterprise or delivering cloud externally these tools are a CSF.

Without the reference architecture to guide our thinking we would have gone to market with a completely different view - I am not sure how many EA teams use these types of 1 page views to guide technology building blocks but I have found reference architectures to be great.

I rarely use those provided in the various EA frameworks but get the team creating them helps with innovation and free thinking. In the cloud reference architecture we used Gartner's four domains but the content came for the architects. The vendors have added a couple of new things but generally it was a great way to build a concept document to go to market with.

How have other teams used reference architectures?