Defining Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is defined as a style of design, deployment, and management of both applications and software infrastructures in which business units of work are packaged as well defined services that are accessible electronically with clearly defined interfaces to communicate & interchange data which are compliant with established & emerging industry standards.

SOA is defined as a style of design, deployment and management of both applications and software infrastructure in which:

• Applications are organized into business units of work (business services) that are (typically) network accessible.
• Service interface definitions are first-class development artifacts, receiving the same degree of design attention (and more) as databases and applications
• Quality of service (QoS) characteristics (security, transactions, performance, style of service interaction, etc.) are explicitly identified and specified for each service.
• Software infrastructure takes active responsibility for managing service access, execution and QoS.
• Services and their metadata are cataloged in a repository and discoverable by development tools and management tools.
• Protocols and structures within the architecture are predominantly, but not exclusively based on industry standards (such as emerging stack of standards around SOAP).

SOURCE: Forrester Research, Inc.