Is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Still a Thing?

The Oldest Buzzword Around

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) isn’t a new concept by any means.

It’s practically a decade old and, in IT years, that’s beyond the useful lifespan of just about all buzzwords. And that’s the problem; as a buzzword, SOA never attained the same level of popularity as Cloud or Big Data. The concept of SOA was nebulous and how an organization could achieve SOA was even more unclear.

Vendors were pitching anything ranging from just an asynchronous messaging infrastructure to a full blown process automation and orchestration suite as the “Conerstone of Enterprise SOA” solutions. Further confusion was caused by product vendors trying to differentiate their products by pushing the importance of interoperability standards (ie. WS-*) claiming that other competing products weren’t truly “SOA” for one reason or another.

This confusion created just as much negative stigma around the term SOA as positive sentiment. While product marketing folks were focusing on the discussion of just what is and isn’t SOA, the Architects were quietly picking and choosing the concepts of SOA that they liked and evolving their enterprises’ IT landscapes.

SOA – Still Alive & Kickin’

Fast forward to today.

RESTful has fully taken over as the web service integration style of choice for the Internet, relegating SOAP for internal enterprise interactions and transactions that are considered “low throughput”. JSON has gained traction in the same way over XML thanks to movement towards mobile computing and a renewed focus on making interfaces as lean byte-wise as possible. No one thinks twice about decoupling the UI from the business logic and integrating using a set of web service calls. And asynchronous messaging is practically the status quo method of propagating large amounts of data across the enterprise.

So yes, the key SOA concepts of:

  1. Developing applications that promote reuse
  2. Decoupling functional application components to improve flexibility and agility
  3. Standardizing the way interfaces are described and interacted with to promote predictable and consistent integrations are more prominent than ever. Exposing Big Data stores as RESTful services is one of the most popular ways of integrating with these technologies. And the SOA concepts of abstraction, service contracts, and reuse are at the foundation of SaaS solutions.

It Just Makes Sense

SOA is at a level of maturity where it no longer benefits from having its own buzzword.

After all, you don’t see organizations advertising that they’re a client-server shop or that they are prolific adopters of web architecture to differentiate themselves in 2013. We’re at a point where sound architecture principles put forward by the proponents of SOA nearly a decade ago, have become just good architecture practice.

The conversations today with IT executives should no longer be “Should you adopt SOA?” but “What should you do to better address reuse, flexibility, and consistency within your enterprise?”