Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Azure Best Practice #3: What's Good for SOA is Good for the Cloud


Azure best practice #3 is to apply SOA principles to your cloud applications. The core ideas of SOA apply equally strongly to the cloud:

  • Software components are loosely coupled.
  • Message-based programs do a lot of the work.
  • Boundaries of communication/reliability/security/transactions are a key consideration in solution architecture.
  • Use of standard protocols and message formats provides broad interoperability.
  • Stateless service development is encouraged which facilitates easy load balancing.
  • Communication is presumed to be expensive.
  • Coarse-grained interfaces are preferred over chatty interfaces.

This isn't a recommendation to use SOAP, however. See Best Practice #4 for a discussion of SOAP vs. REST.

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