By Iqbal Khan
After the explosion of Web applications to accommodate high-traffic usage, the next big wave has become service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is destined to become a standard way for developing extremely scalable applications, and cloud computing platforms like Windows Azure represent a giant leap in moving SOA toward achieving this goal.
SOA allows users to distribute applications to multiple locations, multiple departments within an organization, and multiple businesses across the Internet. Plus, it permits reuse of existing code within an organization and, more importantly, collaboration among different business units.
A SOA application is usually deployed in a server farm in a load-balanced environment. The goal is to allow the application to handle as much load as you throw at it. The question thus becomes: What are some of the considerations you should have in mind for improving both performance and scalability of your SOA application?
Although SOA, by design, is intended to provide scalability, there are many issues you must address before you can truly achieve scalability. Some of these issues involve how you code your SOA application, but the most important bottlenecks often relate to how you store and access your data. I’ll explore those issues and provide some solutions in this article.
Read full Article