A New System of the World for IT

As usual, Todd Hoff nails it, although I don't share his views on PaaS and "open" source completely:

An interesting architecture evolution we are seeing in the cloud is how systems continually reorganize themselves to give components better access to information flows. This allows services to be isolated yet still have access to all the information they need to carry out their specialized function. Before firehose style architectures the easiest path was to create monolithic applications because information was accessible only in one place. Now that information can flow freely and reliably between services, much more sophisticated architectures are possible.

He also talks about Cell Architectures, shame he doesn't link the two, like Meta-Agents.