Another view: cloud not ready to take on SOA heavy lifting

Anne Thomas Manes penned a thoughtful response to my recent post on "Cloud: the SOA we always wanted, but never had?" Anne agrees with my premise that cloud computing will boost the viability of SOA in business contexts, but takes issue with points I made about cloud finally delivering some long-sought SOA promises -- including being understood by the business, being technology agnostic, necessitating provider-consumer contracts, or building trust between service providers and consumers. It's too soon to make these assertions, she states:

As far as I can tell, cloud computing is none of these things. It should be. But cloud is too nascent for such assertions. Besides, in order to achieve these characteristics in cloud-based systems, organizations have to 1- design them that way, and 2- develop the contracts and trust described. You won't achieve these characteristics automagically just by deploying a system to EC2, Force.com, or some other cloud provider.

I agree with Anne that we're in the early stages of this paradigm, and the current cloud model for external-provided services (such as EC2) doesn't address deep integration issues. However, with SOA as the foundation of private cloud implementations, we are more likely to see many of the above-mentioned promises of SOA finally being realized.

My colleague Phil Wainewright also provides some interesting thoughts on private clouds in his latest post. For enterprises, the future may lie in virtual private clouds, or "computing that operates within a public cloud but which uses virtual private networking to give individual enterprises the ability to mask off a portion of the public cloud under their own delegated control and management...  so that enterprises can begin to harness the benefits of cloud computing without having to expose their entire existing infrastructure to the public cloud in one fell swoop."

Clearly the future of SOA as well. Stay tuned.