NOTE: I found this in my archives. It was first published as a comment on the eBizQ website in October, 2011.
The cloud will never be adopted in the enterprise if there are no architectural patterns to apply or reuse in the enterprise. The fact that we are still defining this stuff as we go means that there is no pervasive cloud "architecture" in the true sense of the term, because there are still many moving pieces and many design patterns that have yet to mature to the point of being ready for enterprise adoption.
To that point, however, we are seeing emergent patterns (or antipatterns, if you will) that will have to be taken into account as the cloud becomes an essential component of enterprise architecture:
- Consumerization of IT - the days of IT controlling enterprise architecture down to the desktop are behind us, so enterprise systems need to be designed to support whatever browsers, operating systems, etc. system users choose to adopt, and the architecture has to take on a "principle of least knowledge" design pattern because it is impossible to account for the permutations of endpoint configurations. There is nothing more frustrating than designing a cloud based system only to fail QA or UAT because it was not designed for a specific, archaic browser like Internet Exploder 7.
- Proliferation of mobile - while this may be inextricably linked with the consumerization of IT, I believe that the incorporation of mobile into enterprise architecture represents a cross-cutting concern rather than a separate layer. I myself approached mobile as simply another access point, but I have learned that the mobile experience transcends the network and platform implications and embodies its own architectural patterns that apply first and foremost to enabling the UX with capabilities that are made possible by the mobile architecture (location services, portability, etc), with the more traditional architectural aspects essentially being relegated to what equate to commodity services (seamless network access / switching, security, etc).
- Everything-as-a-service - this is what most everyone refers to as "cloud architecture," and it is, of course, in direct contrast to the monolithic constructs that we had grown accustomed to in the enterprise space. This represents the greatest challenge to incorporating emerging cloud design patterns with established enterprise architecture standards, because it is so radically divergent - what we are seeing is the true manifestation of Service Oriented Architecture. SOA never found its place in traditional enterprise architecture because it represented a fundamental dichotomy, and vendors and IT organizations responded by boxing SOA up and trying to cram it into traditional stacks. Now the cloud has exploded the concept of "stacks," and what we're all trying to figure out is how to assemble the thousands, if not millions, of tiny pieces that are now distributed throughout the public Internet.
In the end, none of us have the answers, but I think everyone on this thread gets where we're heading - enterprise architecture will evolve to incorporate elements of the cloud, but as for whether enterprise architecture "moves" to the cloud...I think it will be the cloud that moves to the enterprise, and we will see a gradual shift towards service-oriented / "cloud" architecture patterns as legacy patterns begin to face attrition and compelling patterns emerge and solidify as true creators of enterprise value.
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