Stack provides an architectural framework based on a range of industry best practices . S 3 : A Service - Oriented Reference Architecture

F or most businesses, a service-oriented architecture offers considerable flexibility in aligning IT functions and business processes and goals. An SOA decouples reusable functions, for example,and lets an organization externalize quality-of-service (QoS) variations in declarative specifications such as WS-Policy and related standards. As a flexible, extensible architectural framework,SOA reduces cost, increases revenue, and enables rapid application delivery and integration across organizations and siloed applications. There’s a challenging downside to SOA, however, in that it’s significantly difficult to create an SOA solution. The architect must figure out how to produce a solution using a well-defined notation or how to organize the solution as an architectural framework with interconnected architectures and transformation capabilities.There is also the question of how to design for reusability and which tools will take the guesswork out of architecture validation and capacity planning. To address these issues, we looked at projects from 2003 to 2006 to determine what an SOA architectural template, or reference architecture, would need. The result is the Service-Oriented Solution Stack (S3), which provides a detailed architectural definition of an SOA across nine layers that aim to reinforce business value.The underlying metamodel—the model for instantiating S3 for a given SOA solution—captures architectural building blocks—reusable functional elements that one or more components or products can realize—as well as the relations among these blocks and among layers, interaction patterns, options, and architectural decisions.The architect uses all these elements to create an SOA solution. Because each layer represents different business value perspectives, the layers effectively separate concerns.The architect can easily create an SOA in concert with methods such as ServiceOriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA; http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-designl/). Consequently, S3 not only enumerates the fundamental elements of an SOA solution, but also provides the ingredients and flexibility to model, architect, assemble, deploy, and manage that solution in a way that best fits a particular organization.