Service Oriented Architecture, What is SOA?

SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is the buzz word in IT now. Why SOA so important these days?

Beginning of 90's, IT solutions learned the trick of Integration and importance of Integration. Messaging Middleware's ruled the solutions. Many solutions emphasized importance of Messaging Middlewares like MQSeries (now known as WebSphere MQ). There is a greater importance on interoperability and need for CORBA technologies.

The solutions carved using middleware technologies are well performed, highly scalable, but not addressing the business flexibility. Often a middleware solution expert would have to explain how the business process was realized. The business knowledge was neck deep into technical solution. This is taking substantially long time to modify the technical pieces to meet the business expectations.

The concepts of choreography and orchestration are emerging by end of 90's and birth of BPM (Business Process Management). In this business processes are realized by orchestrating coarse grained services in a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) flow.

The tough job for an SOA architect is to identify the business logic and business process, and the technical pieces to tie them together in loosely coupled fashion.

What is SOA: SOA is an architectural approach that structures IT assets as a series of reusable services that perform a business functions.