The Emperor's New Clothes: Internet of Services (and Cloud Computing)

In a recent post I talked about cloud computing and I said that, at least in the European Union (EU), this trend is integrated in the Internet of Services (IoS) vision for Future Internet. But what is the Internet of Services?

For the time being, there is no specific entry for IoS in the Wikipedia. However, IoS appears embedded in the definition of Service-Oriented Architecture. The term appears unreferenced in a sentence included in the Web 2.0 section: "In an Internet of Services, all people, machines, and goods will have access via the network infrastructure of tomorrow." Wow! Now I understand why this sentence is unreferenced... From this sentence one can come to the conclusion that "some people" is interested in changing (maybe radically) the structure of the current Internet to integrate (almost) everything in this world. What a challenging endeavour!!! I'm jokin of course. What I want to mean is that peacock terms and this kind of vague sentences should be removed from the entries of the Wikipedia because they may be a source of confusions. They should be moved to blogs like this :-)

But, wait! Who would be brave enough to accomplish this kind of mission? Isn't Google acting on the IoS through Chome OS, Android or App. Engine and the plethora of new services they are offering? Amazon through EC2, giant datacenters and Kindle? Apple through iPhone/iTunes? Microsoft through Azure and XBox Live/Natal? Is the underlying technology and decissions made on these works radical enough to provide users and devices "the access via the network infrastructure of tomorrow"? Or all this stuff are just step-by-step refinements and improvements of already well-known concepts? Of course I think that these actors are providing new services (that can be either categorized under IoS or not, who knows...) but I bet for the second option. Up to now, nobody is offering services based on a radically different Internet infrastructure. But stop again! What about researchers proposing innovative Internet architectures? I think that radical changes are not allowed in such a big infrastructure controlled by nobody in particular and used by millions of people around the globe. I also bet here for incremental improvements in the network infrastructure. An analogy can be established when some time ago, in the early years of SOA, many people claimed that application servers were not ready for the web services revolution and new software systems would be needed. However, application servers still are here, alive and kicking, adapted to the new requirements of SOAs and supporting current many service-oriented applications...

For what I've found in the web, SAP is behind many of the references to the term "Internet of Services". In fact, I found the sentence discussed above in an early vision from SAP exposed in the IEEE WETICE workshop in 2007. During the last 3 years, SAP has been producing a lot of content regarding the Internet of Services concept through the Theseus research program and more specifically through the TEXO project. The SAP's vision of the IoS in Theseus seems an evolution of the enterprise SOA, "making services easy to implement, consume, and trade." To SAP, IoS also embeds Web 2.0 technologies (See also this article in IEEE IT Professional). But, what's new in this approach??? Once again, it seems that there is nothing new under the sun, at least at the conceptual level. In a more recent white paper presented to the EU, this view has been refined and includes the cloud computing paradigm, probably to accomodate it in the Future Internet initiative where the IoS is included. SAP also drives the Internet of Services Community. From this community, I've extracted some of the key points/requirements of IoS:

1. Allow to access services at Internet scale.
   
2. Requires different perspectives (technical, economical…), stakeholders and interests to succeed.
3. Current services, business processes and applications must be accessed seamlessly.
4. Also seamless access to devices and materials is required.

With regard to the first point, it is related to a potential massive access to information from everywhere and from any device. They claim it can be achieved by "combining business operational considerations with current service platforms, cloud hosting, mobility and taking profit from SOA, Service Sciences, Semantic Web, On-Demand Computing and other relevant disciplines related to services.". That is, using existing technologies.

The second point is maybe the one that is more different from the current way of offering services, because it implies the alignment and collaboration of different items and actors (now taken into account or acting almost independently) in order to succeed when providing the different services.

Finally, the third and fourth points, reflect also practices that can be found in current software developments, namely, the seamless integration and accessibility to the information placed in any element of the IT world (services, applications, devices, etc.). This of course includes some of the ideas behind the Internet of Things and virtualization techniques.

In a research paper published in the Social Science Research Network, Man Sze-Li et al. describe IoS as "a fusion of ideas, technologies, practices and communities". The following list summarizes the main requirements for IoS found in this paper:

1. Accommodate billions of users, organization, software-based services and devices, impacting positively on them.
• IoS technology and services as a means to server the user needs (enablers of provision, consumption and pro-sumtion).
• Should enable seamless information, applications, services, networks, provisioning and usage.
2. Produce radically new infrastructures, architectures and platforms.
• Based on a combination of emerging common and standard infrastructures.
• IoS services at infrastructure level must be commonly shared, discoverable transparently and capable of living in an open and dynamic environment.
• Open infrastructure that allows to grow by means of participatory input and not tied to particular technologies nor owned by any entity.

The first point includes commonalities with the first, third and fourth IoS requirements extracted from the Internet of Services community.

The second point, has to do again with the "radical" changes on infrastructures, architectures and platforms. But these radical changes seem to imply the use of technology-agnostic infrastructures, open environments, transparent discovery techniques, etc. which already were promoted by SOAs. This means that the changes may be not so radical. In fact, many of these requirements can be found in system architectures already used by Amazon, Facebook, etc.

On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, the IoS concept seems to be driven by the Services Science initiative. I've not explored in depth the concept of Service Science and its relationship with the IoS yet, but it seems that conceptually arose earlier (as usual) in the U.S than in Europe, promoted by IBM.

To summarize all I've written above, to me, Internet of Services (and this can also be applied to the Internet of Things) are the emperor's new clothes/buzzwords that not so technical people in Europe (e.g. politicians, stakeholders, high level gurus...) are wearing/using regarding the new services that will be deployed in the so-called (and vague concept of) Future Internet whilst cloud computing are the new clothes/buzzwords that techies are spreading everywhere they go to refer to the architecture at the core of IoS that will support the execution of those services. Maybe the use of the future form can be changed to the present continuous form in order to refer to the services that many companies in the U.S. are providing right now.