Service Oriented Architecture: An Extensive Guide

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), i.e. a software architecture design philosophy aimed at empowering components to behave as individual, loosely-coupled, and autonomous network-accessible units, has been creating a lot of buzz lately. It emerged as an evolution of distributed computing in the early part of this century. Before SOA, services were considered the result of the application development process. With SOA, the application itself is composed of services. And, the services get delivered individually or combined as components in a larger, composite service.

And, the services interact over the wire using a protocol such as REST or SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). They are loosely coupled, meaning the service interface is free from the underlying implementation. The developers or system integrators can compose one or more services into an application without necessarily knowing how each of the said services gets implemented.

If it has intrigued you as well, now would be a good time to get a closer look at SOA.

To get an in-depth understanding of the service-oriented architecture, it is important to first acquaint oneself with its different components, which have been listed below for you:

1. Application front-end
2. Service
3. Service repository
4. Service bus
5. Contract
6. Implementation
7. Interface
8. Business logic
9. Data

Now, time to take a look at the two main roles within service-oriented architecture:

1. Service provider: The party responsible for the service’s maintenance along with the organization that furnishes services for others to use are referred to as service providers.
2. Service consumer: The service consumer is capable of determining the location of the service metadata in the registry and building the requisite client components required to bring together and use the service in question.

Let us now move on and take a look at some of the primary factors that are driving the popularity of SOA:

1. Heterogeneity: Different systems, developed across different eras of technologies, are typically distributed and suffer from the lack of any sync. With SOA, it becomes possible to achieve a heterogeneous architecture that helps organizations embrace agile design methodologies.
2. Distributed systems: New-age enterprise IT systems are based on different technology layers and all that is great but when these are loosely-coupled components, they can communicate amongst themselves via APIs or other such interfaces. And engineering such an architecture is critical in modern organizations.

Next up: how the service-oriented architecture works; the overall concept is rather simple: in SOA, the components serve as individual units that provide data or services. These components are independent of proprietary technology systems or vendors, making these services truly independent. It must also be noted that these services essentially serve as the foundation of bigger consumer services where each feature is made of various small SOA services that can be developed, changed, and managed without affecting other services or components.

Finally, we must now discuss how companies stand to benefit from SOA:

1. Scalability: Since SOA services can be operated on several platforms, coding languages, etc., these services can operate on different servers within a single environment, which, in turn, is conducive to scalability.
2. Reliability: Owing to the small and independent services involved in SOA, it is quite easy to test and debug apps since one does not have to painstakingly debug huge chunks of code.
3. Service reusability: Since SOA-based apps are based on self-contained and loosely-coupled functionality services, these services can be reused in various other apps and that too independently and without necessitating interactions with other services.

That about sums it up, folks, i.e. pretty much all there is to know about service-oriented architecture and what companies stand to gain from it. If you too are now keen on leveraging this design paradigm for your software development project, we recommend that you bring an expert with certified service-oriented application testing experience on board ASAP.