Common Misconceptions about Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

You don't have to look far to become aware of the effect that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is having on software systems. Vendors are aggressively marketing hardware, software, tools, and services that support SOA implementation within organizations as diverse as the Department of Defense, banks, federal agencies, manufacturing companies, and health care providers. Even more significantly, customers are embracing SOA as a way to successfully achieve business agility and interoperability among systems. However, our experience from working with current and potential adopters of SOA is that they often have a variety of misconceptions that lead them to oversimplify the effort required to implement SOA. Chief among these misconceptions is the belief that simply by adopting an SOA strategy for the enterprise, an organization has established a well-crafted architecture that will help the organization achieve its many IT goals. In reality, SOA is not an architecture, but an architectural pattern from which an infinite number of architectures can be derived - both good and bad. In this experience report, we discuss at a high level this and several other misconceptions about SOA derived from our experiences