Are the lessons of SOA being ignored with the cloud?

Many of the lessons of SOA have been lost in terms of what SOA originally endeavoured to achieve from a technology perspective. SOA originally promised the ability to choose and use best of breed technologies from different vendors inter operating using a number of standards. This was watered down to being able to use SOA software stack from vendor a, b or c.

The Cloud providers have now done the same by locking people into their particular Cloud so that if you go with Cloud provider a, b or c, you are simply locking yourself into yet another proprietary architecture.

Ideally what would be nice would be to have a generic Cloud image and run it in whatever Cloud you wish. Perhaps for a given workload, the day will even come you can choose your Cloud provider on a daily basis depending on what are you key criteria (e.g. cost) and then deploy your image to that Cloud......however, this wont happen anytime soon.

In the mean, the use of interoperability standards can help to allow you to black box your Cloud providers to move workload from one to the other. You can find more on this topic here if you are interested.