Service Oriented Architecture

According to Wikipedia, Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA definition is:

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a style of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network.

And so, the core of a SOA is the loose coupling of the different services that conform a given system. According to the SOA manifesto, we can point some traits of Service Oriented Architectures:

• Business value over technical strategy
• Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
• Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
• Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
• Flexibility over optimization
• Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

This is a different approach as opposed to internally splitting our application in modules to define boundaries. With a SOA, we will have a set of services that can talk to each other over the network, and so their API will be some form of HTTP or RPC API.