The Eight Principles of Service-Orientation

The service-orientation design paradigm is comprised of eight design principles.

Standardized Service Contract. Services within the same service inventory are in compliance with the same contract design standards.

Service Loose Coupling. Service contracts impose low consumer coupling requirements and are themselves decoupled from their surrounding environment.

Service Abstraction. Service contracts only contain essential information and information about services is limited to what is published in service contracts.

Service Reusability. Services contain and express agnostic logic and can be positioned as reusable enterprise resources.

Service Autonomy.  Services exercise a high level of control over their underlying runtime execution environment.

Service Statelessness.  Services minimize resource consumption by deferring the management of state information when necessary.

Service Discoverability. Services are supplemented with communicative meta data by which they can be effectively discovered and interpreted.

Service Composability. Services are effective composition participants, regardless of the size and complexity of the composition.

At the heart of service-oriented solutions composed of such services is the inherent ability to accommodate change, whether it be change originating from the business community (such as new competitors, regulations, or objectives) or the IT community (such as new technology innovation or legacy technology limitations).