SOA
Service Oriented Architecture
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
SOA is the acronym for Service Oriented Architecture — the architectural style that your company's senior architect keeps bringing up in meetings because that's what they built 15 years ago and it still works (somehow).
Real Talk
See 'Service Oriented Architecture.' SOA is the standard abbreviation used in enterprise contexts, referring to the design approach of building distributed systems as interconnected, reusable services communicating over standardized protocols.
When You'll Hear This
"Our legacy system is classic SOA with an ESB — we're gradually moving to event-driven microservices." / "SOA governance was a whole industry — microservices said 'nah, let teams figure it out.'"
Related Terms
Enterprise Service Bus
An ESB is the central highway that all your enterprise services communicate through. It routes messages, transforms data, and orchestrates workflows.
Microservice
Microservices is an architecture where instead of one big app, you have many tiny apps that each do one thing.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
SOA is the granddaddy of microservices. It's the idea of building software as a collection of services that talk to each other over a network.