What & Why SOA ??

What is SOA

SOA is an architecture style, which exposes business or technical functionalities as reusable, compos-able and self describing stateless service over network.

Advantages of SOA

There are only three advantages of SOA:

1. Re usability
2. Frugality of IT Assets
3. Agility

• Business
• Technical

All other advantages can be derived from these three.

Business & Technical Case for SOA

Business

• Fast pace business environment
• Customers taste change
• Merger, acquisition & split
• Change in business processes & procedures
• Ever changing legal environment
• Ever changing IT environment
• Never ending race for cost cutting

Technical

• Spaghetti of technologies
• Independence from Technology and/or Vendor
• Shrinks SDLC efforts
• Reusable, compos-able services available over network

SOA offer the following advantages over traditional approaches to distributed computing:

• Business services across the platforms
• Provide location independence
• Services need not be at a particular system or particular network
• Completely loosely coupled approach
• Authentication and authorization support at every level
• The search and connectivity to other services is dynamic

Short-term benefits of implementation:

• Enhances reliability
• Reduces hardware acquisition costs
• Leverages existing development skills
• Accelerates movement to standards-based server and application consolidation
• Provides a data bridge between incompatible technologies

Long-term benefits of implementation:

• Provides the ability to build composite applications
• Creates a self-healing infrastructure that reduces management costs
• Provides truly real-time decision-making applications
• Benefits from the perspective of Business Value Ability to more quickly meet customer demands
• Lower costs associated with the acquisition and maintenance of technology
• Management of business functionality closer to the business units
• Leverages existing investments in technology
• Reduces reliance on expensive custom development
  
  When to say NO to SOA

Every one is advocating for SOA. But there must be some scenarios when not to use SOA.

• In Homogeneous IT environment.
• When real time performance is critical.
• When Business and IT environment is static.
• When tight coupling is advantageous not a disadvantageous.
• When huge amount of data transfer is happening.
• When data sharing is in batch mode.