There is a bunch of folks out there that don’t like SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) for various reasons. So I try to look at things without all the buzz and distill out a few aspects that in my view provide value. The goal is to provide an alternative perspective that is hopefully hype-free.

I want to split this in two parts: First (in this post) comes the conceptual side of things, which looks at what SOA in my view is about at its core. Second are the more practical benefits we get from the way SOA is approached in real life. This will be a separate post.

Concepts

As a “preface” let me point out that I look at things mostly from a technical perspective. So everything along the lines of “SOA is about business and not technology” gets pretty much ignored. There are two reasons for that: Firstly I am a technical person and more interested in the technical aspects. Secondly, the business argument is probably the one most resented by skeptics. So let’s get started …

The core thing about SOA is that all functionality is made available as a service (surprise, surprise). This is really trivial and hardly worth mentioning. However, it has far-reaching consequences once you dig a bit deeper. And it’s those secondary aspects that provide the advancements.

• The right level of slicing up things: Of course there were many other approaches and technologies before (e.g. OO and  CORBA). However, none of those has kept its promise. Admittedly it remains to be seen to what extent SOA can fulfill expectations. On the other hand, those expectations are still in flux as we all continue to improve our understanding. So there is a chance that expectations and reality will actually meet some time (where?). Also, the criticism I am aware of is not about this aspect. In fact it seems pretty much undisputed, at least I have never heard anything from customers or prospects.
• The service is the application: A direct consequence of the previous point is that the service gets elevated to the place that was formerly held by an entire application; at least from a user’s perspective. Whether the implementation reflects this or not is irrelevant to the consumer.
  For new development it is usually desirable that the internals match the services exposed to the outside. For “legacy” stuff that just gets a service interface, the wrapper logic takes this place. In either case, however, the exposed logic is much smaller than an entire application.
• State management: There has been a lot of talk about loose coupling. This principle can be applied at many levels, transport protocol and data format being the obvious ones. A slightly more subtle place is the handling of state, which pretty much depends on the aforementioned transport protocol and data format.
  The interface, at least of the initial operation, must be exposed in a way that it can just be called.  In other words it is kind of stateless. Of course from that point on everything could be state-full. There is no difference between SOA and traditional applications here. In reality, however, people pay much more attention to keeping things stateless when working in a SOA context.
• Life cycle management: This one is strongly related to the point “the service is the application”. The notion of a life cycle has formerly mostly been on the level of entire applications. The obvious disadvantage is that this huge scope almost demands big bang-approaches for new versions. With the effort and costs associated for bringing a new version into production, there are only very few such releases and much stuff gets crammed into it. The risks increase, business agility is close to zero and nobody is really happy. With a service as the “unit to be delivered”, the scope is drastically reduced and so are things like risk, complexity etc. Thus I think the concept will be brought to much more practical relevance than before.
• Standards: Although a real SOA can be built using an entirely proprietary technology, in reality a set of standards has established itself. Yes, there are probably to many WS-* things around that only work together in particular versions. So I would not recommend to jump onto too many things. But with the basic things you are certainly on the right track.

There is probably a whole lot more to say, but let’s keep it here for now. I am looking forward to any comments on the subject!