Representing SOA and its application to businesses
A design pattern developed in order to develop distributed systems is known as Service-Oriented Architecture. Using a protocol, the services are delivered to other types of applications. A service indicates a unit of functionality and it has the ability to exchange information. This service can operate on its own. Communication between various services can occur via message-based communication offered by SOA (Endrei et al., 2004). In SOA, communication occurs between a service provider and a service consumer. Both the service provider and the service consumer can understand the service connection.
Image 1: Understandable connection between message consumer and message provider
(Source: www.javatpoint.com, 2020)
Figure 2: Components of SOA
(Source: www.sciencedirect.com, 2020)
Figure 3: Webservices SOA
(Source: medium.com, 2020)
Overview of the most essential thing about SOA
Interoperability is one of the most important features in SOA. It means that different types of services can operate on different types of the software platform. For instance, web services SOA is a classic example of interoperability. It allows the operations of various types of distributed web services over a software platform as well as over hardware architectures. In other words, this phenomenon is also regarded as platform independence. The example of Java, a programming language can be considered as it ensures platform independence. Interoperable web services can be developed across various types of platforms such as Java WSDP 1.5 and J2EE 1.4. Moreover, these platforms support UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and other types of technologies (Channabasavaiah, Holley & Tuggle, 2003). The interoperability feature is one of the essential features of web services and it is based on industry-related standards and guidelines. The developers build interoperability based on these standards and guidelines. Hence, a user can be benefitted from the SOA design after using web services only. In some instances, confusion might occur because the utilization of SOA to resolve business issues requires an understanding of specifications.
Chosen image to explain SOA to any non-technical manager
A non-technical manager will not be able to understand the technical aspects of SOA. Therefore, it is reasonable to explain to them the basics of SOA. They need to know the functional aspects of SOA and the service quality aspects of SOA. In other words, they need to have an idea about the components only. Hence, Image 2 has been chosen. The functional aspects highlight that SOA transports the requests for services between a service provider and service consumer (Valipour et al., 2009). Both the provider and consumer can communicate with one another. SOA offers a real service and the business process highlighted in the image indicates the group of services that can meet the requirements of the business. The service registry consists of a description of data that service providers will use in order to publish the services. Similarly, the manager should understand the quality aspect of SOA so that he or she can ensure service quality. In the image, the policy indicates protocols and procedures to be maintained while providing services. The transaction provides consistency in results. Lastly, management indicates the collection of attributes that should be considered so that services can be managed efficiently.
References
Channabasavaiah, K., Holley, K., & Tuggle, E. (2003). Migrating to a service-oriented architecture. IBM DeveloperWorks, 16, 727-728.
Endrei, M., Ang, J., Arsanjani, A., Chua, S., Comte, P., Krogdahl, P., … & Newling, T. (2004). Patterns: service-oriented architecture and web services (pp. 17-44). New York, NY: IBM Corporation, International Technical Support Organization.
Valipour, M. H., AmirZafari, B., Maleki, K. N., & Daneshpour, N. (2009, August). A brief survey of software architecture concepts and service oriented architecture. In 2009 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (pp. 34-38). IEEE.