Phil Wainewright: Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge?

Some really interesting things jumped out in Phil’s post, but what really stood out was the second paragraph.  The insight into the challenges of evolving to a cloud computing mindset is worth at least a few reads, as some of us that live in the Cloud tend to forget the seismic shift in thinking we have to go through when detaching from the ‘enterprise’ model.  One line in particular has me waxing philosophic about why SOA tends to be viewed as a software package or vendor offering rather than as a design principle:

“A constantly recurring theme in the evolution of SOA, cloud and the Web has been the misplaced imposition of trusted, existing structures onto emergent patterns of interaction.”

Specifically, I began to wonder whether SOA is inextricably linked to “web services” software just because  we tend to try to rationalize complex and unknown structures with what we already know and are comfortable with, or if my initial belief that SOA’s adoption (or even understanding for that matter) has been co-opted by traditional software vendors is more defensible.  Or is there really a difference between the two – i.e. are the blind leading the blind?

In any case, SOA and cloud computing are starting to be mentioned in the same breath by many of the visionaries in the space, so it will be interesting to see whether we can drive to a point of widespread mainstream adoption of the view of cloud computing as the technology manifestation of the SOA philosophy, or if the Cloud will also be co-opted by the traditional enterprise players with deep marketing pockets and short-sighted intentions.