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Service oriented architecture - 1

SOA, Yes, it expands to Service oriented architecture. What is it?
Keep these things in mind during design and analysis.
1. Whenever you design a service, you are designing a service for a business task.
2. These services can be linked to achieve bigger business goals.

Let us understand 'Service':
In my view, a service is an expectation fulfillment for a service consumer, without service consumer actually worrying about how is it fulfilled.
For example: A student opts of 'Data structures' lesson. The delivery of a lesson is a service for the student. The professor does his homework, examples and makes sure that student understands the lesson. Student and the professor are the different entities, yet there is a well defined service contract between them which enabled two entities exchange the expectation without student actually worrying about the service implementation aspects of the professor.

So, to be called a service, it should be meaningful. It should satisfy the certain expectations. It should be bound by well defined interfaces. Any design that is designed keeping 'service definition' in mind, is a service oriented design.

SOA is an architectural model for integrating business partners', customers' and suppliers'services into enterprises' business processes. 

Why SOA?

  • Promotes reuse of IT investment in a business [will touch upon example, later]
  • Promotes greater IT flexibility [will touch upon example, later]
  • Greater IT flexibility means business flexibility [will touch upon example, later]
  • Helps enterprises comply with government regulations [will touch upon example, later]

SOA is characterized by
- Well defined interfaces between the services.

Barriers for SOA adoption:

  • Difficult to justify ROI [will touch upon reasons, later]
  • Build vs Buy justification
  • New IT investment or use existing IT investment
  • Complexity of legacy application [How, will touch upon later]

While designing the services, consider the following:
- Business and IT alignment
- SOA Governance
  • Decision rights
  • Processes
  • Policies
  • Controlling aspects
  • Monitoring aspects

SOA Governance enables stakeholders to identify ROI.

SOA: DIY Kit
  • ESB, for aggregation, routing , transformation
  • BPM, for business process orchestration
  • Web services, well known means of service implementation
Examples will follow ...

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