Service-Oriented Architecture or SOA is an architectural approach for designing and developing a web application. In this approach, an application uses services available over the network via communication calls or requests.
SOA includes a set of design principles that structure system development while providing means for integrating components into a unified and decentralized architecture.
It allows developers to merge a considerable amount of facilities from existing services to the application.
In SOA, resources are packages as “services”, that are self-contained and well-defined modules that offer standard business functionality and are independent of the context or state of other services.
There are three major roles within Service-Oriented Architecture:
In the Service-Oriented Architecture, the entire backend system is majorly divided into three parts, that are: Service Provider, Service Broker/Registry/Repository, and Service Consumer/Requester.
- Service Provider
It is a maintainer and organization of the service that makes one or more services available for others to use. The service provider creates a web service and provides information to the service registry. It has to decide the service category and trading partner agreements that are required to use the services.
- Service Broker, Service Registry or Service Repository
The main purpose of a service broker, service registry or service repository is to make the web service information available to the potential requester. The one who administers the broker decides the scope of it. While the public brokers can be accessed from anywhere, private brokers are only accessible by a limited number of users.
- Service Consumer/Requester
Service Consumers can locate entries in the broker registry through different find operations for binding them to the service provider to invoke one of the services. It develops the needed component for clients to bind and use the services.
Services might associate data and information gathered from other services or build service workflows to fulfil the need of the consumer, which is known as service orchestration. Another essential pattern of interaction of services is service choreography that controls the coordinated service interactions without any certain point of control.
Advantages of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
What are the top 8 advantages of SOA? Here is the list of key benefits or advantages, you can achieve through Service-Oriented Architecture.
- Reliability With small and independent services in the SOA, it becomes easier to test and debug the applications instead of debugging the massive code chunks, which makes the service-oriented architecture highly reliable.
- Location Independence Services are located through the service registry and can be accessed through Uniform Resource Locator (URL), therefore they can change their location over time without interrupting consumer experience on the system while making SOA location independent.
- Scalability As SOA enables services to run across multiple platforms, programming languages and services, that is, services of the service-oriented architecture operate on different servers within an environment, which increases its scalability.
- Platform Independence Service-Oriented Architecture permits the development of the complex application by integrating different services opted from different sources that make it independent of the platform.
- Lossely Coupled The loose coupling concept in SOA is inspired by the object-oriented design paradigm, that reduces coupling between classes to cherish an environment where classes can be changed without breaking the existing relationship. SOA highly encourages the development of independent services to enhance the efficiency of the software application.
- Reusability An application based on SOA is developed by accumulating small, self-contained and loosely coupled functionality services. It allows the reusability of the services in multiple applications independently without interacting with other services.
- Agility The capability of gathering applications from reusable components or services, instead of rewriting and reintegrating each new development project helps developers to design an application rapidly in response to the new business requirements which in return increases the agility of SOA.
- Easy Maintenance As the service-oriented architecture is an independent unit or entity, the maintenance or updates of the application has become far easier without having to worry about other services.
Overall, SOA is an enterprise-wide approach to architecture and it communicates to their respective functionalities or components through Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Moreover, the concept of SOA has become the central component of modern virtualization and cloud computing in microservices and middleware.
Source: Decipher
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