Concept of SOA in Tech-world
Globalization has transformed the face of business.
Companies are rigorously adopting novel technology to gain competitive
advantage. Among various advanced software developing technology, SOA (A
service-oriented architecture) is a type of software architecture in which all
of its services use protocols. This facilitates users to combine
functionalities and form applications built from previous services. Since last
two decades, SOA has been the standard development practice. According to the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, Services
Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing
distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership
domains. It offers a uniform approach to discover, interact with and use
capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable
preconditions and expectations.
Key components of SOA are service, service provider,
clients, service locator, and service broker. These components permit the
services to work and manage independently.
The fundamental principles of service-oriented
architecture are autonomous of vendors, products and technologies. With the
cloud, SOA lacks scalability and slows down with work request changes, restricting
application development.
Service-orientation has been recognized as best fit
approach to handle intricate business challenges due to the innate agility and
reuse attributes of this architecture style.
When comparing with microservices, several developers
found that SOA is more granular approach. Supporters of the SOA model consider
that the microservice architecture is the natural fruition of SOA required to
accommodate cloud computing and fulfil snowballing demands for quicker software
development cycles.
Service oriented development brings to the IT world success
and when deployed using a SOA, services also become the foundation for more
easily creating range of new strategic solutions such as rapid integrated
application, automated business processes, multichannel access to applications
including fixed and mobile devices. SOA facilitate the composition of services
across disparate piece of software whether old or new, departmental, enterprise
wide or inter enterprise, mainframe, midtire, PC or mobile device to streamline
IT processes and eliminate barriers to IT environment improvement.
SOA presents a methodology to achieve application,
interoperability and reuse of IT assets that features a strong architectural
focus including governance, processes, modelling, and tools. SOA represents an
ideal level of abstractions for aligning business needs and technical
capabilities and creating reusable coarse gain business functionality. SOA
signifies a deployment infrastructure on which new applications can quickly and
easily built. SOA is a reusable library of common business and IT functions.
It is established that SOA is a framework for integrating
dissimilar resources or applications. SOA permits different applications
written in different languages on different systems to be accessed and
retrieved by a single composite application, such as a portal. Portals are a
combination of all the tools and applications linked together by the SOA.
Portals work in synchronized manner with other supporting technologies such as Content
management systems, Document management systems, Knowledge management tools, Enterprise
search, Light directory access protocol, Business intelligence, Web
applications for finance, HR and operations, Customer relationship management
and Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis).
Architectural Components of SOA used for SOA Deployment
are Web Services, Portal Framework, Application Servers, Integration Framework,
Security Framework, Analytics Framework, Master Data Management, Enterprise
Service Bus, and BPM Framework.
Major benefits of SOA include faster and more flexible
reconfiguration of business processes, less operational costs of information
technology, secure and reliable service levels Implementing upgrades and
product enhancements on the fly, seamless plug and play of different technology
providers and/or custom legacy code.
Company faces several challenges while implementing SOA. These
challenges align to the steps in a project deployment plan such as:
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Service identification.
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Service location.
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Service domain definition which means how services
should be grouped together into logical domains.
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Service packaging which entails how is
existing functionality within legacy mainframe systems to be re-engineered or
wrapped into reusable services.
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Service orchestration indicates that how are
composite services to be coordinated.
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Service routing means how are requests from
service consumers to be routed to the appropriate service and/or service domain.
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Service governance.
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Service messaging standards adoption.
To wrap up, SOA is fundamentally a collection of services
which communicate with each other. SOA is an effective approach to software design
to map the needs for efficient, reliable, agile enterprise BI solutions. Briefly
stating, Service oriented architecture is a standards-based and business-driven
IT architectural approach to manage services made available by different
software packages for reuse and reconfiguration.
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