What is the SOA life cycle?

What is the Service Oriented Architecture SOA life cycle?

The core IT assets of any organization include its data, legacy systems, line-of-business applications, packaged applications, and trading partners. Each of these resources is a service provider responsible for producing numerous highly specific outputs, such as inventories and customer data.

Service orientation ties together these disparate and autonomous sources of information, bridging a wide range of operating systems, technologies, and communication protocols. The process by which it does this is an iterative one of creating (“exposing”) new services, aggregating (“composing”) these services into larger composite applications, and making the outputs available for consumption by the business user.

Expose

The expose phase of the service oriented architecture SOA approach focuses on which services to create from the underlying applications and data. Service creation can be fine-grained (a single service that maps to a single business process) or coarse-grained (multiple services come together to perform a related set of business functions).

The expose phase is also concerned with how the services are implemented. The functionality of underlying IT resources can be made available natively if they already speak Web services, or can be made available as Web services though the use of an adapter.

Compose

Once services are created, they can be combined into more complex services, applications, or cross-functional business processes. Because services exist independently of one another as well as of the underlying IT infrastructure, they can be combined and reused with maximum flexibility. And as business processes evolve, business rules and practices can be adjusted without constraint from the limitations of the underlying applications.

Consume

Once a new application or business process has been created, that functionality must be made available for access (consumption) by either other IT systems or by end users. The goal of the consumption process is to deliver new, dynamic applications that enable increased productivity and enhanced insight into business performance. Users can consume the composed service through a number of avenues, including Web portals, rich clients, Office business applications, and mobile devices.