The goal of this thesis is to give a high level picture of cloud computing and implement a working prototype of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The theoretical part studies what is cloud computing. Its supporting techniques and defining features are looked into as well as what benefits and drawbacks there are. Then a SOA Platform is implemented in EC2 in two separate configurations. The former implementation is an automatically scaling SOA cluster configuration. The cluster consists of Oracle SOA stack and uses the cloud computing. The cluster is used as platform to enable building of other enterprise systems using SOA technologies. The latter is a SOA training environment, which is used for training people to use Oracle SOA stack. Cloud computing enables trainees to take part in training sessions even with slow computers, because the necessary resources are accumulated from the cloud.

Both implementations successfully demonstrate some benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing. For example, the lack of upfront costs made this kind of project possible. Meanwhile, need for absent special requirements prevented the use of Real Application Cluster (RAC) database. Cloud computing is still evolving to smooth out some of its rough edges. /Kir11