Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Glossary

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Glossary

Service - Services are self-contained, reusable software modules that are independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run. Services have with well-defined interfaces and allow a 1:1 mapping between business tasks and the exact IT components needed to execute the task.

Service orientation - A way of thinking about your business processes as linked, loosely coupled tasks supported by services.

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. SOA helps today’s businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. SOA helps customers increase the flexibility of their business processes, strengthen their underlying IT infrastructure and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among disparate applications and information sources.

SOA foundation - Integrated, open-standard-based set of software, best practices and patterns that is designed to provide what you need to get started with your SOA.

SOA infrastructure - As clients adopt SOA this new simplified, virtualized and distributed application frameworks pose challenges for infrastructures that must be addressed. To ensure the new applications can meet their performance, availability, scalability, security and management requirements, the infrastructure needs to be assessed and transformed to support SOA.

SOA infrastructure solution - The SOA infrastructure solution from IBM is designed to help you increase business flexibility, responsiveness and performance by enabling your IT infrastructure for SOA. We start by leveraging your existing IT assets, then evaluate, design and implement the enhancements needed to establish a more flexible and robust infrastructure.

SOA lifecycle - The SOA Lifecycle defines a methodology for conducting successful SOA projects by modeling the business process and the services that will support them, assembling the services into a composite application, deploying the services in a robust, scaleable environment, managing and monitoring key IT resources and business metrics, and doing all of these lifecycle steps while adhering to solid governance and best practices.

SOA Reference Archictecture - SOA Reference Architecture defines the comprehensive IT services required to support your SOA at each stage in the SOA life cycle.

SOA Scenarios - SOA Scenarios define specific SOA projects customers can implement while focusing on a very small number of targeted software products and/or services per project.

Source: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/glossary/index.html