Toward Cloud-Agnostic Middlewares

Cloud computing is a natural progression of service-oriented architecture. The Web as the platform: data with Web 2.0, programming and development with mashups, and deployments and resource provisioning with cloud computing. However, the Web was not necessarily designed to be an on-demand compute platform and infrastructure and certainly not designed to be a network for data centers which is what it is displacing with cloud computing. The success of service-oriented architectures is apparent from the proliferation of Web 2.0 services exposing APIs. This modern-day SOA is leading to a large number of applications and services as well as the possible combination of these services as new applications, aka mashups.