Cloud Computing and SOA

In a blog posting earlier this week David Linthicum writes about the synergies between SOA and Cloud Computing. He mentions that "... the real value of cloud computing is the ability to identify services, data, and processes that can exist outside the firewall in somebody else's data center"

This is an interesting thought. While I tend to agree that one of the benefits of Cloud Computing is the ability to outsource resource management (in this case data center capacity), in my mind the true value of cloud computing goes far beyond. 

The true value of cloud computing is that it enables the creation of never before seen applications. The scalability, openness and speed to market are already reshaping the traditional monolithic and rigid corporate applications. This will be a transformational change. Enabling and supporting this transformation is the true value of Cloud Computing.

David also mentions that "... one can consider Cloud Computing the extension of SOA out to cloud delivered resources ...". The way I see it, Could Computing is the ultimate instantiation of Service Oriented Architectures. I think software architectures like REST and programming frameworks like Ruby On Rails will drive the evolution of SOA towards ROA (Resource Oriented Architectures) like Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson like to call it. Not really an extension but rather an evolution.