Where Is SOA Going? By Bob Rhubart

SOA principles drive new focus.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been a topic of conversation among IT professionals since before phones got smart and the word cloud referred to something other than airborne water vapor. While the basic concept of SOA hasn’t really changed, perceptions and practices around implementing SOA continue to evolve.

Services are everywhere, and with this burst of cloud, mobile, and API initiatives, SOA couldn’t be in better shape.

Rolando Carrasco,
SOA Principal Architect and Co-Owner, S&P Solutions

To get a sense of how that evolution is playing out among people who work in SOA, I put the following question to the community via an Oracle Technology Network discussion forum: Where is SOA going?

As it happens, three of the most detailed responses came from the authors of the book Oracle API Management 12c Implementation. That’s particularly fitting, given that their book’s general subject matter, API management—always a factor in SOA—has taken on even greater significance as the use of cloud-based services becomes increasingly prevalent in enterprise IT.

Oracle ACE Director Luis Weir, the book’s lead author and the principal architect at HCL Industries, is confident of a solid and rosy future for SOA as an architectural concept. But he thinks how we talk about it is changing.

“SOA has been reborn in the form of ‘digital technologies’ such as IoT [Internet of Things], API management, microservices, and cloud integration solutions,” Weir says.

Among those digital technologies, API management looms large as a connecting thread. In a post on his blog, Weir defines the term API management as “the discipline that governs the software development lifecycle of APIs. It defines the tools and processes needed to build, publish, and operate APIs.” Given that APIs provide the means for connection and interaction between services—in the cloud and elsewhere—the elevated role API management plays in today’s SOA is understandable. Read the complete article here.

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