What do you expect a SOA platform to be? What are the key elements that you are looking for in an SOA platform?
SOA is about services and architecture. You have to have services, service providers and service consumers. So a SOA platform, at the very least, need to have support for developing and deploying services, and consuming services.
You can develop and deploy services from scratch. But, your legacy systems yield immense business value. Hence, you should be able to wrap your legacy systems and expose them as new services with your SOA platform.
Next, services in a SOA should be extensible. You should be able to secure the base service, make it transactional, or reliable, through the application of QoS aspects. In today's business environment, security is the most sought after extension.
Then, the power of SOA is in its ability to compose services. You can get few basic services and compose those into a more value added service. In other words, you can compose several fine grained services into more coarse grained value added services. This make sure that you can re-use existing services to build new business functions.
You can define your business process by putting together several services and orchestrating them the way you want. And to be agile and be responsive to the market trends, you should have the ability to fine tune your business process at your will.
When the number of services within your platform grow, and the demand for your services increase, managing and governing your services become mandatory. You should be able to keep track of what services are in your system, version them, manage their lifecycle, maintain metadata about those services. In short, you should be able to be in control of the services deployed with your SOA platform.
While you have to design and build the SOA within our organization to suite your business, choosing the right tools, based on the above expectations for a SOA platform can make your life easy. In summery, your SOA platform should be capable of:
- Develop and deploy services and clients
- Wrap/expose legacy systems as services
- Extend services with QoS capabilities
- Service composability
- Business process management through service orchestration
- Service management and governance
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