What, Where and Why

What -
Lets start with 'What is SOA?' - Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural approach to develop ad-hoc services and connect them to form an information management system. SOA allows us to create distributed services and exposes themselves to other services with an predefined service contract.

So what is a Service here - Yes, A service is an independent software component having business logic and expose itself through self-describing interface.


Where -
Why we bother about SOA, because of its decoupling nature. As we know if any system coupled tightly with the services it is very difficult to modify without disturbing the other services.

The cost of maintenance raises as the count of services increasing in tightly coupled distributed system. In the maintenance cost perspective SOA gives you the feasibility to minimize the cost factor.


Why -
So where we can use this SOA? basically most of the SOA projects are integration based projects where we can use the loose coupling concept to integrate the services.

SOA perfectly fits in the area where we reuse and composite the services to create new business processes. When a business extending, modifying its services or switching to other service providers or consumers SOA is the best option.