When to use SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

wcf web-services architecture soap soa
lomaxx picture lomaxx · Jun 9, 2009 · Viewed 16.5k times · Source

I had a conversation with one of our architects recently and he summarized his use of SOA as "The only time we'll use services is when we need async actions otherwise we'll use go direct to the data store"

I thought about this statement and it seems fairly logical as services work well in a publish subscribe model, but I was wondering in what other scenarios you should be looking to use SOA?

Answer

albertjan picture albertjan · Jun 9, 2009

We expose services to our customers because they shouldn't be able to connect to the datasource directly.

We expose services to ourselves because it's easier to spread them over different technologies using WCF.

We expose services because we have different user interfaces for the same datasource. And when we use services we save a third of the work.

It is never only because of the async actions.

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