Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA is a design for linking business and computational resources (principally organizations, applications and data) on demand to achieve the desired results for service consumers (which can be end users or other services). Service-orientation describes an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network in a SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems.
The main drivers for SOA adoption are that it links computational resources and promotes their reuse. Enterprise architecture believes that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro (objects) level.
The following guiding principles define the ground rules for development, maintenance, and usage of the SOA

• Reuse, granularity, modularity, compos ability, componentization, and interoperability

• Compliance to standards (both common and industry-specific)

• Services identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking.

One obvious and common challenge faced is managing service metadata. Another challenge is providing appropriate levels of security. Interoperability is another important aspect in the SOA implementations.

SOA implementations rely on a mesh (Mesh consists of semi-permeable barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible/ductile material. Mesh is similar to web or net in that it has many attached or woven strands.)Of software services. Services comprise unassociated, loosely coupled units of functionality that have no calls to each other embedded in them. Each service implements one action, such as filling out an online application for an account, or viewing an online bank-statement, or placing an online booking or airline ticket order. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their source code they use defined protocols that describe how services pass and parse messages, using description metadata.
SOA developers associate individual SOA objects by using orchestration (Orchestration describes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services.). In the process of orchestration the developer associates software functionality (the services) in a non-hierarchical arrangement (in contrast to a class hierarchy) using a software tool that contains a complete list of all available services, their characteristics, and the means to build an application utilizing these sources.