Before we talk about Cloud, I want to quickly review where SOA came from. Most of us who started our IT careers in the 80s and 90s will clearly remember the pre-web Enterprise environment. Of course, so will everyone else - because that legacy is still with us. The typical systems were monolithic, complex applications that were completely self-reliant. Any interfacing with other systems was done through batch dumps. Applications grew and grew and grew into monsters because the only option was to enlarge the application - inter-application connectivity was too complex and unreliable to envisage.

Bottlenecks to application scalability are a thorn in many architects' sides. Offloading the database and dumping the impedance mismatch with object caching is one answer, but that may require major changes to a company's data management environment. In an exclusive interview with DZone, Ari Zilka, the CTO and co-founder of Terracotta, Inc., explained how his company can solve scalability problems and ease the transition into the cloud.