Explore the Role of Service Repositories and Registries in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Understanding the Definition of Each and When to Use Them

Overview

Many recent publications [Longworth, Clement, Seeley] define registry/repository functionality as a lynchpin of any Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation. The enterprise-wide nature of SOA [Lublinsky] requires a significant amount of collaboration between design and implementation teams. Analysts designing business processes need to find services providing functionality required by these processes. Finding a service best suited for solving a particular business problem is critical for successful process implementation. However, functionality alone doesn't guarantee service applicability. Questions about nonfunctional requirements, for example, Service-Level Agreements (SLA) or security requirements, help potential service users assess whether a set of services picked for a given solution will work together. Finally, services dependencies have to be addressed.