This report explores the possibilities and advantages of using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to overcome the scaling and performance issues we are currently facing. SOA is an architectural style that sees every service as an individual encapsulated unit. There are service providers and service users. Users do not have to worry about the functioning of the service instead, they can only focus on the final product. The service providers will take care of the functions of the services we use. Each service communicates with one another through a standard communication protocol over a network. In simple words, SOA is putting together individual services in a way to achieve the desired goal, instead of building and maintaining everything ourselves. It gives more flexibility and scalability.
There are no industry standard principles for SOA, many industry sources have published their own. Some of them are:
- Standardized service contract
- Service reference autonomy
- Service location transparency
- Service longevity
- Service abstraction
- Service autonomy
- Service statelessness
- Service granularity
- Service normalization
- Service composability
- Service discovery
- Service reusability
- Service encapsulation
SOA is already widely used for constructing large distributed systems. The flexibility of Service Oriented Architecture enables us to respond more quickly to ever-changing market conditions. We can promptly change the required services and get the systems up and running quickly and efficiently. It allows us to look into the problems as a whole. There are multiple places in our project where we can benefit from using SOA, instead of our solutions. Service Oriented Architecture is independent of technology so, we can use our existing assets as well as connect more services to them.
Conclusively, SOA is one of the best approaches for solving the performance and scalability problems we are currently facing.