S3: A Service-Oriented Reference Architecture

For most businesses, a service-oriented architecture offers considerable flexibility in aligning IT functions and business processes and goals. An SOA decouples reusable functions, for example, and lets an organization externalize quality-of-service (QoS) variations in declarative specifications such as WS-Policy and related standards. As a flexible, extensible architectural framework, SOA reduces cost, increases revenue, and enables rapid application delivery and integration across organizations and siloed applications. There's a challenging downside to SOA, however, in that it's significantly difficult to create an SOA solution. The architect must figure out how to produce a solution using a well-defined notation or how to organize the solution as an architectural framework with interconnected architectures and transformation capabilities. There is also the question of how to design for reusability and which tools will take the guesswork out of architecture validation and capacity planning