SOA puts pressure on the network

One of the effects of SOA is that business transactions may move from silo operations to being made up of multiple services spread across the enterprise, all hooked together across the network. However, this can put a lot of extra pressure on the network.

On the one hand, this clearly introduces additional network traffic, as messages linking the business services together fly from one node to another. This is all additional network traffic - in silo mode, everything would be carried out on a single server or platform. As SOA accelerates, and reuse increases, this issue will grow correspondingly. So it is important to make sure that the network can handle all this additional traffic.

However, the other issue for the network is no less serious. Moving from one service to another introduces a whole set of new potential points of failure. If there is a problem with the network between any of the service nodes, the business transaction will be unable to run properly. Therefore, in order for the SOA approach to make sense, the network reliability must be at an acceptable level.

These two problems suggest that anyone looking to adopt and deploy SOA better make sure that they audit both the additional capacity available in the network, and the network availability levels.

Steve