Applied SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture and Design Strategies

CHAPTER 3

Getting Started with SOA

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

– Mark Twain

We defined SOA as an architectural style promoting the concept of business-aligned enterprise services as the fundamental unit of designing, building, and composing enterprise business solutions. So how do you go about designing and building solutions and the services that support them? This chapter covers the role of the SOA methodology in the creation of enterprise SOA solutions and the methodology’s major steps. For each step, a high level overview of its goals, requirements, and activities is provided.

The details of these steps are the topic of the rest of the book. In general, each major step in service design is covered in a chapter later on. Specifically, in this chapter, we cover:

• An overview of SOA methodology
• Defining the reference architecture
• Defining the business architecture
• Information design
• Identifying services
• Specifying services
• Implementing services
• Service design process

Finally, we end with some practical suggestions for getting started.

Overview of SOA Implementation Methodology

Enterprise SOA defines a set of business-aligned IT services (available to participants throughout the enterprise across multiple lines of business or even outside of the enterprise) that collectively address an organization’s business processes and ...