Putting it together – what is SOA?
Service Oriented Architecture is a reference architecture that is based on services. This means that SOA is a specific structured approach, based on services.
If architecture is defined from the perspective of services, it is called "service-oriented" or SOA in short.
Note
Service-orientation can be applied on all levels: business level (the breakfast example), information level (applications delivering services to realize business processes), and technology level (web services such as OrderService, services provided by infrastructure such as storage or high-availability, and so on).
According to The Open Group, a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through IT standards, SOA has a set of distinctive features:
It (SOA) is based on the design of the services—which mirrors real-world business activities—comprising the enterprise (or inter-enterprise) business processes.
Service representation utilizes business descriptions to provide...
