Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design approach that focuses on building functional, scalable software systems from individual components, called services. Services can interact with one another to perform tasks, such as allowing someone to sign in once and access a variety of business applications. In SOA, the emphasis is on modularity, reusability, and interoperability—when businesses break complex applications down into smaller, more manageable building blocks, the result is greater flexibility and scalability.
Services aren’t hard-coded into applications. Instead, services are a published to a registry, and when an application wants to use a service, it asks the registry to find the latest version. In this way, services can be easily changed or updated by people without detailed knowledge of the application. An SOA approach makes it easier to adapt to changing business needs and to integrate systems that provide related functionality.
With SOA, individual services are loosely coupled and can communicate and transmit data as needed. For example, taking an SOA approach to developing cloud software creates benefits, including:
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a design paradigm that creates or supplements applications with self-contained, reusable building blocks—services—that provide specific functions and can be invoked over a network. Each service has a defined scope and can be accessed by other components or services within the architecture to enhance the overall functionality and performance of the system.
Examples of services in a service-oriented architecture include a payment processing service, a customer management service, or a product recommendation service that can be embedded in an ecommerce site. Other services can be far simpler, like one that provides the current time in a city on the other side of the globe. As an example of a powerful benefit of using SOA, switching payment processors can be done without altering applications that need to use the service.
SOA makes for a modular and flexible software infrastructure, where individual services can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. Two key benefits are ease of maintenance and scalability.
SOA works by loosely coupling services within the framework of an application. Each service works as a module capable of delivering the input/output requested. The application doesn’t need to know the version of the service it’s using. Instead, it checks a registry and finds the most current service offering the functionality needed. Consider the following workflow of a retailer’s website built with an SOA model.
SOA speeds development of this sort of site by allowing integration of services in an off-the-shelf manner. In this example, the retailer is not only spared the burden of developing each of those modules individually but it’s also freed from needing to track service updates. IT can simply use vetted services with proven functionality, security, and availability.
The key to SOA development is to think modularly and understand where opportunities exist for service integration. Applications developed in the cloud can easily take advantage of huge arrays of SOA-style services implemented as web services.
A modular and flexible SOA infrastructure delivers major benefits for companies embracing cloud. Here are other top trends.
