On SOA
Posted on 19 January 2013 by Nick Boyce. Find me on Google+
I finally got around to reading Paul Dix’s Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails over the new year break. Having worked on a number of services for a platform at my previous job, I was very familiar with the benefits (and drawbacks) of service-oriented architecture but it really concreted my understanding of what SOA could do for our organisation.
I’ve since been devouring articles on the topic, and have listed a few below that I have particularly enjoyed.
- SOA for the Little Guys. This article does an amazing job of introducing SOA concepts right through to code examples.
- Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods. Hugely detailed post, with a focus on pitfalls of the SOA approach. Failure at some point in the system is inevitable.
- Refactor Your Monolithic Rails App to a SOA (particularly slides 11-25)
- Service Oriented Architecture at Square. A really interesting presentation from Square’s Chris Hunt on their SOA approach.
- Abstracting Features Into Custom Reverse Proxies. Another video from Rubyconf on custom proxies to front and normalise multiple services.
- Amazon Architecture. When you view a page on Amazon there are famously more than 100 services that are accessed to build it. This old post on the High Scalability blog outlines Amazon’s SOA approach.
- Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay. Detailed article on Ebay’s architecture from Randy Shoup.
- LinkedIn Architecture. Outline of the evolution of LinkedIn from a monolithic app to a service-oriented approach. Slides are also available.