What are SOA and SaaS?

I love family dynamics, where you can't say "SOA? Tell me about it" without it coming back to haunt you for years in the online and physical world. No problem, though, I've got yer back!

SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture (though as with any acronym in the modern age there are dozens of possible definitions for SOA that you can find online) and it's described briefly by soamatters.com, for example, as: "a technical architecture supported by standard protocols and data formats, an approach to designing information systems that exposes enterprise assets as configurable actors within a dynamic business process, or a new business paradigm that synchronizes the goals of the board room (execs) and server room (IT)"

"Simplified" view of SOA [Javaworld.com]

In a nutshell, SOA is a service-based view of business computing where the architecture is developed so that individual components are easily reused and can be deployed faster and more efficiently. Mostly SOA solutions seem to be built around web-based services and offer a simple package of capabilities for offices large and small. They're particularly well suited for modern distributed offices where there are employees scattered throughout the United States or even the world.

Two examples: on the user end, check out Google Apps for Business, an attractive package of private-labeled Gmail, Google Docs and additional security that lets you instantly bring up a pretty sophisticated Intranet with document sharing and a variety of other nice features (see http://www.google.com/a/).

Many people believe that it's the "plumbing", the backend infrastructure that really define an SOA solution, however, and for them the Amazon Web Services model is a splendid example. We can call AWS the "cloud in cloud computing", if you're familiar with that, but between its on-demand network-based processor and disk space services, the Amazon architectural solution neatly embodies many of the coolest facets of modern network computing. (see http://aws.amazon.com/ for more info)

Another buzzword you'll probably encounter with your brother, by the way, is SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. Again, it's the same basic idea as SOA, it's just the "front end" or "face" of the service oriented architecture. It's probably fair to say that Google Apps for Business is in fact a better example of SaaS than of SOA (see, we're falling into this acronym soup too, aren't we?)

Clear now? Probably the best thing you can say to your brother next time you see him is something about whether he means true SOA or whether his company is actually one of the many that confuse SaaS as SOA. You'll probably baffle him, and that'll be for the best. Then you can lord that over him for years to come...

Good luck!