What is a service-oriented architecture?

What will be an ideal response?

The SOA approach attempts to design loosely coupled and autonomous services that can be
combined to provide flexible composite business processes and applications. SOA principles
provide a unique design approach for building Web services for SOA:
? loose coupling: services must be designed to interact on a loosely coupled basis;
? reusability: logic that can potentially be reused is designed as a separate service;
? contract: services adhere to a communications contract that defines the information exchange
and any additional service description information, specified by one or more service
description documents;
? abstraction: beyond what is described in the service contract, services hide logic from the
outside world;
? composability: services may compose other services, so that logic can be represented at
different levels of granularity thereby promoting reusability and the creation of abstraction
layers;
? autonomy: services have control over the logic they encapsulate and are not dependent upon
other services to execute this governance;
? stateless: services should not be required to manage state information, as this can affect their
ability to remain loosely-coupled;
? discoverability: services are designed to be outwardly descriptive so that they can be found
and assessed via available discovery mechanisms.