9 Essential SOA Design Principles Every Architect Should Follow

SOA design should be as simple as possible. When designing a SOA service, keep these nine design principles in mind:

1. Standard Service Contract

Services should follow a single service description.

2. Loose Coupling

Dependencies between services should be minimized.

3. Service Abstraction

Each service encapsulates its own business logic and hides it from the outside world.

4. Service Reuse

Business logic is split into multiple services to maximize reuse.

5. Service Autonomy

Each service should have control over the logic it encapsulates.

6. Stateless Services

Ideally, services should be stateless.

7. Service Discovery

Services can be discovered, typically via a registration interface.

8. Service Composition

Some services break large problems into many smaller ones.

9. Service Collaboration

Services should implement standards that allow different subscribers to use them, a principle that has become obvious enough to be treated as a rule.

These nine principles are often summarized in a single diagram for quick reference: