Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Defining Service Orientation

Service orientation is an architectural approach based on implementing business processes as software services. These business services consist of a set of loosely coupled components — designed to minimize dependencies — assembled to support a well-defined business task. Designing systems with modular business services results in more efficient and flexible IT systems. Systems designed to incorporate service orientation allow organizations to leverage existing assets and easily accommodate the inevitable changes experienced by a dynamic business. In addition, there are situations when a set of services needs to be combined. This ensures that these combined workloads will be able to execute with less latency than would be possible with loosely coupled components.

Service orientation is also a business approach and methodology. Using a service-oriented approach helps businesses adapt to change and makes the scalability of cloud computing possible.

Business services play an essential role in systems designed with a focus on service orientation. These business services cross a number of different IT systems, effectively breaking down the organizational silos that formed around conventional IT systems. We define a business service as the self-contained and reusable software components that you create to carry out your important business processes. Some of these business services may have additional component services. Each service provides a function. Basically, ...