Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged from the previous practices of object orientation and component-based application development to promote better reusability and flexibility of business components. This is a new approach towards building application architecture for an organization. Successful implementation of SOA requires several infrastructure components that can support various services, and relationships between various service providing applications to service the consuming applications. The paper explains the infrastructrural components of a typical SOA and discusses the key architectural and design decisions along with various layers of SOA.

Typically, Information Technology (IT) infrastructure of an organization is built over a period of time with different applications developed at different points in time, on different platforms to meet different business needs. This gives rise to heterogeneity in the organization's IT infrastructure across operating systems, applications, system software and application infrastructure. Today, organizations face the challenge of being agile and respond quickly to the changing business environment; leverage upon the existing IT investments and application infrastructure to address newer business needs; support different channels of interaction with customers, partners and suppliers. This calls for having a well-crafted IT architecture that can support the present services requirement, and easily scale up for future needs while optimizing the use of the existing IT infrastructure.

Further, application and technology infrastructure for the company are highly interdependent. When business processes change, the applications supporting such processes also need to be changed and realigned accordingly. Given the shrinking time to manage change in business processes, one really has to have solutions that adapt to changes within days instead of weeks/months, at the same time, at minimum possible cost. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has evolved as a solution to address the heterogeneity of IT infrastructure by loosely coupling independent applications and align business processes and technology infrastructure.

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