Service-oriented architecture is the shape of distributed computing in the Internet Age. At the heart, SOA is a set of practical approaches for designing shareable, reusable services. It lets enterprise IT groups treat a decentralized, multiplatform environment as a unified computing fabric. But SOA also is a mess waiting to happen.
By encouraging widespread reuse of scattered software components, SOA threatens to transform the enterprise network into a complex, sprawling unmanageable mesh. Left ungoverned, SOA could allow anyone anywhere to deploy a new service at any time, and invoke and orchestrate that service - and thousands of others - into ever more convoluted messaging patterns. In such an environment, coordinated application planning and optimization become fiendishly difficult.
