Cloud Computing Realigns SOA Role

From its inception Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been a lightning rod for dissention among enterprise architects, solution architects and application architects. Enterprise architects view SOA as a business initiative that should be guiding what information technology assets receive investment and how they relate to the business’ goals and mission. Solution architects view SOA as a means to deliver solutions faster using the tenets of loose-coupling and finer-grained services, which enable faster construction. Finally, application architects see SOA as an infrastructure on which to deliver applications based on service interfaces. Regardless of viewpoint, SOA was clearly focused on the software architecture domain; that is until the arrival of cloud computing.