Service Oriented Architecture

A Service Oriented Architecture is a collection of self-contained services that can communicate with each other. A Service Oriented Architecture is a collection of self-contained services that can communicate with each other.

Key characteristics of services:
loosely coupled
coarse grained
typically published & available for invocation

Defining services at a “business level” enables quick composition of end-to-end business processes, delivering on the promise of greater IT flexibility and agility