Updated March 23, 2023
Difference Between SOA vs Microservices
In this article, we will see an outline of SOA vs Microservices. Both are distributed application development architecture with lots of advantages over monolithic application architecture; these two are the main and widely used architecture for building an enterprise application or meeting a certain industrial requirement. A single monolithic application is divided/decomposed into multiple small/tine services; each of the services is independent of each other and individual manageable components; we can consider it as an extended version of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). SOA is a service-oriented architecture which is a collection of well-defined business services, each of the service defines its core business function, which is focused on business function reusability; these collections of services communicate with each other by using common centralized manage service, or enterprise service bus for example mule soft ESB.
Head to Head Comparison Between SOA vs Microservices (Infographics)
Below are the top 12 comparisons between SOA vs Microservices:
Key Differences Between SOA vs Microservices
Let us discuss some key differences between SOA vs Microservices:
- SOA is the collection of well-defined business-oriented service that communicate with each other using the centralized managed service or enterprise service bus. There is some medium required to establish the communication among the services this service mostly used in the development of very large, scalable enterprise project. The microservice architecture is a distributed form of SOA, where the system focused on decoupling the service into a tiny small manageable service that can communicate with each other by using simple message transfer or REST/SOAP.
- SOA based services are classified into four main categories Function service – which the business user targets; Enterprise service – which is shared service among the team; application service- Which is targeted by the application development team, Infrastructure Service – which is targeted by the infrastructure team. Whereas microservices architecture works in the distributed format, it shares as minimum service as possible. There are no defined criteria for categorizing the services required to develop the application.
- In SOA architecture, the work scope of individual service can range from small service to the entire application subsystem of the enterprise, even sometimes SOA service represents the entire application product as a service that is consumed by the other SOA based service using the enterprise service bus. Whereas in a microservice architecture, the purpose of the service is well defined that does one thing well. Each service component is smaller enough to manage and develop for fulfilling the particular server.
- Component sharing is the main purpose of the enterprise; that is why SOA comes into the picture; it focused on to sharing the services as much as possible and enhanced the service sharing among the system or represent the entire system as a service, whereas Microservice architecture minimizes the components/service sharing with another service, Microservice is based on the bounded context principle according to this the data is a single unit with minimum dependency, which makes communication among the services very fast. In SOA, the service is dependent on the other services, which make the communication flow between the services. Due to this SOA based system is slower as compare to microservice-based architecture.
- SOA communication is based on the message middleware components, which is not found in the microservice architecture. This middleware component added various service communication capability such as routing, gateway, message enhancement, protocol transformation, representational state transfer with load balancing. Whereas microservices architecture based on the API (Application Programming Interface) for communication, this API layer work among the producer and consumer services.
- SOA architecture is based on MSMQ (Microsoft Message queuing) Active MQ and RebbitMQ for sometimes messaging the communication will take place by using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) whereas in microservice architecture mostly uses REST (XML/JSON) based communication for messaging or accessing the remote services.
Comparison Table of SOA vs Microservices
The table below summarizes the comparisons between SOA vs Microservices:
|
SOA |
Microservices |
| It is based on the service sharing principle and shares the distributed service as much as possible. | Each service is a single entity that can do only one thing, which is based on a single data unit; hence it minimizes the sharing as much as possible. |
| It is based on the concept of business functionality reuse. | It is based on the bounded context. |
| All the services have a common development standard. | The development standard depends on the collaboration and requirement of people. |
| It uses the entire subsystem as a service and focused on coupling for reusing the service. | It is focused on service decoupling and logic separation. |
| Communication takes place using an enterprise service bus or message queuing. | Communication takes place using the REST/SOAP API layer. |
| Used in Large/Scalable enterprise project. | Used in the project range from small to large scale. |
| SOA supports the propagation of the heterogeneous protocol used in multiple subsystems. | It reduces the choice for integrating the subsystem/services; it supports integration for the service, which uses a common communication protocol. |
| DevOps and CICD is popular for SOA but not yet actively used in SOA based architecture. | It is focused on DevOps, cloud-based, container-based deployment with the CICD pipeline. |
| Tradition relational SQL database is more often used at the persistence layer, | The modern relation/non-relational database is popular at the persistence layer. |
| Support Multithreaded with multiple parallel IO operations. | Most of the application is single-threaded (with each request) comparatively with less IO operations. |
| A principle of SOA is based on model programming. | A principle of microservices is based on component-based programming. |
| It can be developed by using MuleESB, MS BizTalk as a middleware component. | It can be developed by using the NETTY or Spring cloud library. |
Conclusion
There is no any particular answer that architecture is better than another, it dependents on the enterprise requirement for which the application is building, SOA is the best fir and more suited for the large and scalable application that requires integration or coordination among a large number of services based on different protocol and communication medium, SOA is not useful for small application development, because irrespective of the size of the application which needs to develop SOA requires all those components or middleware which requires to establish the communication among the services. On the other hand, microservices are manageable and give you much better control for developing web-based/API-based application.
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This is a guide to SOA vs Microservices. Here we discuss the key differences with infographics and comparison table respectively. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
