In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service orientation. By consequence, it is as well applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
Service orientation is a way of thinking in terms of services and service-based development and the outcomes of services.
A service has four properties according to one of many definitions of SOA:
- It logically represents a repeatable business activity with a specified outcome.
- It is self-contained.
- It is a black box for its consumers, meaning the consumer does not have to be aware of the service’s inner workings.
- It may be composed of other services.
Different services can be used in conjunction as a service mesh to provide the functionality of a large software application, a principle SOA shares with modular programming. Service-oriented architecture integrates distributed, separately maintained and deployed software components. It is enabled by technologies and standards that facilitate components’ communication and cooperation over a network, especially over an IP network.
SOA is related to the idea of an application programming interface (API), an interface or communication protocol between different parts of a computer program intended to simplify the implementation and maintenance of software. An API can be thought of as the service, and the SOA the architecture that allows the service to operate.
Characteristics Of Service-Oriented Architecture
While the defining concepts of Service-Oriented Architecture vary from company to company, there are six key tenets that overarch the broad concept of Service-Oriented Architecture. These core values include:
- Business value
- Strategic goals
- Intrinsic inter-operability
- Shared services
- Flexibility
- Evolutionary refinement
Principles
There are no industry standards relating to the exact composition of a service-oriented architecture, although many industry sources have published their own principles. Some of these include the following:
Standardized service contract
Services adhere to a standard communications agreement, as defined collectively by one or more service-description documents within a given set of services.
Service reference autonomy (an aspect of loose coupling)
The relationship between services is minimized to the level that they are only aware of their existence.
Service location transparency (an aspect of loose coupling)
Services can be called from anywhere within the network that it is located no matter where it is present.
Service longevity
Services should be designed to be long lived. Where possible services should avoid forcing consumers to change if they do not require new features, if you call a service today you should be able to call the same service tomorrow.
Service abstraction
The services act as black boxes, that is their inner logic is hidden from the consumers.
Service autonomy
Services are independent and control the functionality they encapsulate, from a Design-time and a run-time perspective.
Service statelessness
Services are stateless, that is either return the requested value or give an exception hence minimizing resource use.
Service granularity
A principle to ensure services have an adequate size and scope. The functionality provided by the service to the user must be relevant.
Service normalization
Services are decomposed or consolidated (normalized) to minimize redundancy. In some, this may not be done. These are the cases where performance optimization, access, and aggregation are required.
Service composability
Services can be used to compose other services.
Service discovery
Services are supplemented with communicative meta data by which they can be effectively discovered and interpreted.
Service reusability
Logic is divided into various services, to promote reuse of code.
Service encapsulation
Many services which were not initially planned under SOA, may get encapsulated or become a part of SOA.
Patterns
Each SOA building block can play any of the three roles:
Service provider
It creates a web service and provides its information to the service registry. Each provider debates upon a lot of how’s and whys like which service to expose, which to give more importance: security or easy availability, what price to offer the service for and many more. The provider also has to decide what category the service should be listed in for a given broker service and what sort of trading partner agreements are required to use the service.
Service broker, service registry or service repository
Its main functionality is to make the information regarding the web service available to any potential requester. Whoever implements the broker decides the scope of the broker. Public brokers are available anywhere and everywhere but private brokers are only available to a limited amount of public. UDDI was an early, no longer actively supported attempt to provide Web services discovery.
Service requester/Consumer
It locates entries in the broker registry using various find operations and then binds to the service provider in order to invoke one of its web services. Whichever service the service-consumers need, they have to take it into the brokers, bind it with respective service and then use it. They can access multiple services if the service provides multiple services.
Organizational benefits
Some enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and more cost-effectively to changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (Service) level rather than micro (Classes) level. It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.
With SOA, the idea is that an organization can look at a problem holistically. A business has more overall control. Theoretically there would not be a mass of developers using whatever tool sets might please them. But rather they would be coding to a standard that is set within the business. They can also develop enterprise-wide SOA that encapsulates a business-oriented infrastructure. SOA has also been illustrated as a highway system providing efficiency for car drivers. The point being that if everyone had a car, but there was no highway anywhere, things would be limited and disorganized, in any attempt to get anywhere quickly or efficiently. IBM Vice President of Web Services Michael Liebow says that SOA “builds highways”.
Reasons for treating the implementation of services as separate projects from larger projects include:
Separation promotes the decoupling of services from consuming projects. This encourages good design insofar as the service is designed without knowing who its consumers are.
Separation promotes the concept to the business that services can be delivered quickly and independently from the larger and slower-moving projects common in the organization. The business starts understanding systems and simplified user interfaces calling on services. This advocates agility. That is to say, it fosters business innovations and speeds up time-to-market.
Documentation and test artifacts of the service are not embedded within the detail of the larger project. This is important when the service needs to be reused later.