Cloud: the dawn of the SOA era

The re­cent an­nounce­ment of Ap­ple's cloud il­lus­trates yet again that a new era is about to start: that of the cloud - and with that, the mas­sive adop­tion of ser­vice ori­ent­ed ar­chi­tec­tures (SOA).

This will have an im­pact so huge that it is hard to un­der­es­ti­mate. Some of the ob­vi­ous changes that will hap­pen are most like­ly the fol­low­ing:

• In­fras­truc­ture (op­er­a­tions) will be­come ag­ile - at the ex­pense of IT jobs in op­er­a­tions. Ap­pli­ca­tions will be de­ployed with un­prece­dent­ed ease and speed. This is be­cause the cloud in­fra­struc­ture will trans­par­ent­ly al­lo­cate the re­sources that now are al­lo­cat­ed by hu­man ad­min­is­tra­tors.
• SOA will be­come main­stream. This is be­cause even the most com­mon in­fra­struc­ture ser­vices will be vir­tu­al­ized, run­ning in the same or a dif­fer­ent VM from the ap­pli­ca­tion, and scal­ing up and down as need­ed.

The in­ter­est­ing part - at least to us - is that trans­ac­tions will be­come more dis­trib­uted than ever. We are ready for this change - are you?