From SOA to Micro-SOA: It’s a macro shift

A modern legend says that Isaac Newton, in spite of being a genius, had built two doors for his cat house, a big one for his cat and a smaller one for its kittens, not realizing that both could have used the same big door. Let’s see whether this "one-size-fits-all" philosophy relates to the evolving world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

SOA is an architectural approach that facilitates building of reusable business services on top of a layered, secure and integrated solution. The value realization achieved from SOA can be and has been debated. The side-effects of adopting this architectural style has been a creation of complex, course-grained and tightly coupled services built on top of a monolithic application. And such SOA services are hard to change, deploy on multiple platforms to meet the performance.

As the need to build internet scale applications has risen - with the advent of mobile devices and digitization of enterprises - the concept of micro-services has come into existence and has a major role to play. Micro-services is a software architecture style in which small, independent and truly decoupled services are built which possess the following characteristics:

Characteristics	How does it help?
Designed with optimum scope of responsibility and are preferably fine-grained	Separation of concerns, ease in managing dependencies and greater control of service behavior by enforcing specific rules and policies
Built as independently deployable units which can be hosted on any platform/container	Prevents putting "all eggs in one basket" and provides, parallel development and deployment flexibility to achieve scalability
Provide high interoperability in a distributed environment	Ease of interconnectivity which facilitates plug-n-play approach

From a 50,000 feet view, developing micro-services seems nothing more than decomposing/ rationalizing existing monolithic SOA services. However, in actuality, it warrants the need of Micro-Services Oriented Architecture (Micro-SOA) because this will not only bring a radical change in how we identify and design services but will also impact the underlying infrastructure and systems that hosts and supports it.

For example, if a micro service relies on system of records being maintained in a legacy or mainframe system, then the benefits of performance or scalability can’t be achieved unless the system causing the bottleneck is replaced or a replica of the data is bundled with the micro service. This leads to the complication of keeping the data in sync between the legacy systems and micro-service data store.

So what are the key takeaways?

While SOA services can be thought of as "one-big-door-for-all-cats" as that seems to be the obvious solution derived from common sense, but "one-door-for-each-cat" kind of micro-services might still be required to achieve service autonomy, modularity and reduce points-of-failure and bottlenecks.
Micro-SOA is definitely an emergent pattern for building scalable and distributed applications but stakeholders must assess the benefits and complexities before adopting it as the change is not as "micro" as it seems.

About the Author

Hitarshi Buch has 17 years of IT experience in architecture, consulting, design and implementation using API, SOA, BPM and Java/J2EE technologies. He has experience in IT transformation & modernization initiatives and has provided enterprise-wide SOA-based solutions. Hitarshi is currently working as a Senior Architect in Service Transformation at Wipro Technologies and is part of Blockchain practice. He is responsible for Blockchain CoE activities and supporting client engagements.

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SOA: It’s a macro shift

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