The union of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Oracle SOA Suite is a match made in heaven. Recently, we tested Amazon EC2 by marrying components of Oracle SOA Suite with EC2 to demonstrate how utility computing and SOA are shaking the foundations of current IT provisioning, development, deployment and maintenance models. This article examines how SOA technologies enable utility computing to move beyond the vision stage and become a reality.

Amazon EC2 is a massive farm of Linux servers at your finger tips. It enables you to bring up a single server or many server instances -- all installed with preconfigured Linux images -- with a single command. You can use pre-packed Linux images provided by EC2 -- public images are currently available that include Apache and MySQL -- or build new images and upload them to Amazon's S3 storage service.