[Term of the Day]: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Term of the Day
"Service Oriented Architecture"
Definition — What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?
SOA, or Service Oriented Architecture, defines a way to make software components reusable via service interfaces. These interfaces utilize common communication standards and work seamlessly with each other in such a way that they can be rapidly incorporated into new applications without having to perform deep integration each time.
When businesses flourish, they often add new products and services. While these additions may help make the business larger, it is often difficult to implement them in an efficient manner. The goal of SOA is to make it easy for businesses to grow and add new services.
For example, a company sells clothing through an online store. After a few months of successful sales, the company decides to add an electronic department. An SOA component conveniently adds a new section to the store, in this case, specifically for electronic. The company then wants to add a new payment mode. An SOA payment component makes adding the new payment mode options as easy as checking a few boxes in an administrative control panel. Initially, the company only offered phone support, but later decides that adding chat support would be beneficial. A chat support component allows the chat support representatives to look up customer orders the same way the phone support specialists could.
Basically, SOA makes it possible for a business to add new features and services without having to create them from scratch. Instead, they can be added or modified as needed, making it simple and efficient to expand the business. Because many products and services are now offered via the Web, most SOA solutions include Web-based implementations.
Benefits of SOA:
Respond quickly to business changes: The reusable-services aspect of SOA makes it much easier and faster to assemble applications, instead of developers starting from scratch each time as would be the case with monolithic applications.
Leverage existing infrastructure investments: SOA makes it easier for developers to take the functionality of one platform or environment and scale and extend it to new ones. Reduced costs from greater agility and more efficient development.
Easy maintenance: Because all services are self-contained and independent, they can be modified and updated as needed without affecting other services.
Promotes Interactions: Support new channels of interaction with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Loose coupling: It facilitates implementing services without impacting other applications or services.
Allows for scalability: Since SOA permits services to run across multiple services, platforms, and programming languages, scalability is greatly increased. And SOA uses a standardized communication protocol, allowing enterprises to decrease interaction between clients and services. Lowering this level of interaction allows apps to be scaled with less pressure and inconvenience.
Greater reliability: SOA generates apps that are more reliable as services are small in size, it is easier to test and debug them.
Convenience of availability: SOA facilities are available to anyone.
Check this article to learn more about SOA.