Services Oriented Architecture (SOA): Principles, Benefits, and Implementation
Prince Sinha
on
November 09, 2022
In this world of technology, meaningful and understandable software can be controlled easily. While designing the application's architecture, loose coupling between the services is necessary, meaning services should behave as a standalone application. This kind of architecture is called service-oriented architecture because, in this architecture design, we mainly focus on designing separate services and using them to make the whole application. Services-oriented architecture is easy to manage and testable because you need to test or even compile the whole application when you change any of the services.
If you listen to service-oriented architecture(SOA) for the first time, then in this article, we will see everything about service-oriented architecture and how they benefit us.
What is Services Oriented Architecture?
Why Use a Services-Oriented Architecture?
How to use SOA in an Organization
Services-Oriented Architecture Principles
Benefits of Using Services-Oriented Architecture
Implementation of a Services-Oriented Architecture
What is Services Oriented Architecture?
Service-oriented architecture is a way of developing large-scale applications with the help of services. Earlier, when monolithic applications were in trend, some drawbacks were noticed in the case of large-scale applications. For example, large-scale application is very difficult with monolithic architecture buildings, and the architecture becomes much more complicated. In the service-oriented architecture, developers use different services for different functionalities and connect them through a network or as third-party libraries. These services are made in such a way that they are easily reusable and accessible through a network call. These services are fully functional applications and do not depend on any other application component. That is easy for the developers to integrate the whole application using SOA. Also, if you see the entire functionalities and definition of service-oriented architecture, you may confuse it with microservices architecture, but SOA differs from SOA. Various things like speed, interoperability, and data sharing between services in SOA are different from microservices.
Why Use a Services-Oriented Architecture?
Services-oriented architecture has various benefits compared to monolithic and microservices architecture. We have mentioned some of the benefits of services-oriented architecture in this section.
Reusable code:
The service-oriented architecture allows us to write services that can be reused again. Reusability is the most important thing; otherwise, your codebase can become very large. It makes the development very efficient as the developer does not need to make the same component every time. Also, service-oriented architecture helps faster integration and testing, You can also write the service in any programming language you want.
Easy communication
Services that are developed in SOA are connected to a network. It means the messages sent from one service can be easily sent to another. You can do various kinds of like and also secure communication using firewalls.
Scalability of the application
We have seen why monolithic architecture is not scalable for big applications because everything is in one place. Service-oriented architecture helps us to make separate services for different needs according to preference. You will make different services for different purposes, which are applications. It can compile and execute independently. Scaling the application also becomes easy when the code is well structured. Service-oriented architecture also helps in maintaining code quality.
Cost Effective
Service-oriented architecture is cost-effective in many ways. Reusing some components saves both time and money you may have to spend on developers. Also bug reporting also becomes easy when you divide the whole application into smaller components, saving a lot of time.
How to use SOA in an Organization
Service-oriented architecture can be used in many places for sending crucial information, building large-scale applications, etc. Some of the current use cases of the SOA are sending information to many armies, using any inbuilt software by a mobile application, improving healthcare by integrating new tech with existing tech, etc. You must have seen that the mobile application uses GPS services or Bluetooth services to enable some functionalities within the app. This is a pure example of how SOA can be used.
The use of SOA in the organization can make your application more flexible in tackling market changes and changing product features easily. You can control the feature using separate services. Any service can be combined together to make some new features. Also, it helps in saving time for the developer team and increases their productivity.
Services-Oriented Architecture Principles
Although no strict architectural principles need to be followed in a service-oriented architecture. Some of the best practices are there in the market have given the best results. In this part, we will talk about some of the principles of service-oriented architecture:
Loose coupling of services:
Services made for the application must be independent and a standalone application. It should not depend on any other debugging, building, or testing service.
Service abstraction
This can be also considered a black box technique. The exact logic inside the code should not be visible to those consuming the services. Whole business logic should be encapsulated by the consumers for security purposes.
Relevant Services
Any service which is created for the application should be logical, and it should provide a relevant service. Service should not be specific for some input and should be given a general structure and can be called from anywhere.
Service Transparency
All the services should know the existence of another service. Any service can be called using network calls from another service.
Benefits of Using Services-Oriented Architecture
Service-oriented architecture has many benefits, which will help your organization to scale and grow. In this section, we will talk about some of them.
Easy feature extension
The basic usage of using the interface is the feature extension. Using these services, you can easily tweak the features according to the requirements. You can extend the features if you use services in your application. It increases the productivity of your developers and reduces the time in developing any feature.
Cost reduction
The service-oriented architecture help in reducing the cost for any extension in feature. Using the service, you can easily change or extend the basic features because they are made in a general way to tackle the new requirements. It also helps reduce the cost of the resources because you won’t need to build all the services whenever you make changes to one service.
Easy development
Doing separate service for separate features are relatively easy than making the whole feature at once. You can make services in a general way, and after the development, just deploy them and call using some network call or any method used in your application.
Implementation of a Services-Oriented Architecture
Service-oriented architecture can be implemented to make building blocks of the application. You can implement these using multiple programming languages and generally implemented using web services, which makes your service accessible over the internet. One such web service standard is SOAP, which gained popularity after a recommendation from W3C in 2003. SOAP is a messaging service that helps transfer messages from one service to another. Other services which can be used instead of SOAP are Jinni, COBRA, ApacheThrift, gRPC, RabbitMQ, or REST. Since the services can be written in any language, you can implement them in any of the above languages.
Conclusion
So far, we have discussed what service-oriented architecture is and its benefits. Service-oriented architecture is very helpful when developing a big application that will require a lot of iterations and revisions. Service makes the app more flexible and easy to tweak for basic feature extension. It helps you in reducing costs and time and increases productivity. Services are small components that are standalone features and can be independently executed. The implementation of SOA is not very difficult, you just need to figure out a programming language according to your requirements.
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