Do You Think the Pervasive Use of Cloud Computing Will Expand or Contract the Use of SOA?

Peter Schooff, Managing Editor at ebizQ, asked this question on the ebizQ SOA forum today.

Most SOA and Cloud practitioners have probably wondered about this very same thing. I definitely have asked myself this question - albeit in different forms - many times over the past couple of years. A while back (2007) I had written an article in ebizQ titled Leveraging Synergies: RTI and SOA Unite in which I talk about using RTI (think an internal, private cloud) and SOA together for two main reasons:

1. They share similar objectives
   Both RTI and SOA seek to maximize ROI albeit at different layers of the technology stack; RTI at the infrastructure (hardware) layer and SOA at the business application (software) layer.
   
   
2. They complement each other
   Using one concept (SOA or RTI) without the other leads to an impedance mismatch between the infrastructure and application layers resulting in suboptimal benefits realization.
   

The same logic applies to application architecture targeted to cloud environments. In fact, you could say that the cloud is the "A" in SOA :). With clouds, SOA has a winning partnership such that if there were ever any doubts about the long-term strategic benefits of SOA, clouds help alleviate most if not all of them.

Originally posted in the ebizQ SOA Forum on September 10, 2009.