SOA Reference Architecture – Key Principles

 

The SOA Reference Architecture (SOA RA) has been defined and refined with consideration for the following principles:

  1. The SOA RA should be a generic solution that is vendor-neutral.
  2. The SOA RA is based on a model of standards compliance.
  3. The SOA RA should be capable of being instantiated to produce intermediary industry architectures and concrete solution architectures
  4. The SOA RA should promote and facilitate IT-to-business alignment.
  5. The SOA RA should address multiple stakeholder perspectives. For organizations implementing the SOA RA within their enterprise, the SOA RA should be generic enough to be independent of vendor solutions, and the SOA RA should define standard capabilities, building blocks, architectural decisions, and other attributes to create a framework of understanding sufficient to enable an assessment of conformance. For product vendors, the SOA RA should provide a set of standards and enough specificity that they can use it to drive evaluation of compliance with those underlying standards. For integrators, the integrator should be able to use it as a model to define specific constraints and directions for SOA implementations. For standards bodies, the SOA RA should provide a reference against which standards can be extended, or guidelines provided, more detailed levels of specificity can be defined, etc.
  6. The manner in which the SOA RA is instantiated should be determined by the user of the SOA RA.
  7. The SOA RA should use the fewest number of layers to depict the possible combinations and elements of an SOA.