SOA-Readiness of REST

Abstract

SOA is a core concept for designing distributed applications based on the abstraction of software services. The main strength lies in the ability to discover services and loosely-couple them with service consumers across platform-boundaries. The evolved service protocol SOAP and its accompanying standards provide a stable, rich and widespread technology stack for implementing SOA-based systems. As an alternative approach to design and implement distributed systems based on services, the architectural style REST gains traction, due to its more lightweight and data format independent nature. Whether REST is also suited for acting as a basis for implementing SOA-based systems is still an open issue, however. This paper focuses on this question and provides an analysis on the SOA-readiness of REST. Both, a theoretical analysis and an empirical study of REST frameworks have been conducted in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding on this matter. The results show a lack of core SOA principles mainly related to the discoverability and the loose coupling of services.

A unified service‐based capability exposure framework for closed‐loop network automation

“…Also, orchestration systems provide rich APIs (cell C3) that are leveraged to perform network (slices) lifecycle management, allowing operations such as VNF re-orchestration and re-configuration, and also path management of the physical and logical links that interconnect different infrastructure deployments located far away. Finally, orchestration and control solutions usually provide (cell C4) "AI as a Service" features (for instance, the inclusion of ACUMOS 4…”

“…The proposed unified service-based architecture relies on three types of components that provide the needed functionalities: the interdomain message bus, the capability registration and discovery functions, and the enhanced exposure functions. The overall ¡ FIGURE 4 The proposed unified architecture for cross-domain capability registration, discovery, and exposure.…”

“…2 Recently, many network-related standards adopted service-based architecture (SBA) 3 principles that reference service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigms. 4 Here, a network function (NF) can flexibly communicate with other NFs to consume the provided services, thus overcoming the limitations of a reference-point-based interaction, where an interface is only defined between two NFs.…”

“…The continuous development toward more flexible networks 1 makes softwarization a key enabling technology that has also impacted standardization during the last few years; starting from the introduction of software‐defined networking (SDN) and followed by the network function virtualization (NFV) concepts 2 . Recently, many network‐related standards adopted service‐based architecture (SBA) 3 principles that reference service‐oriented architecture (SOA) paradigms 4 . Here, a network function (NF) can flexibly communicate with other NFs to consume the provided services, thus overcoming the limitations of a reference‐point‐based interaction, where an interface is only defined between two NFs.…”

On the Need for a General REST-Security Framework

“…When considering REST for the design of service systems of any kind, the general security demands of service-oriented architecture (SOA) [18] apply. The ability of REST-based systems to also comply with the SOA principles has been analyzed and shown in [19]. As SOAP-based web services have been and still are a dominant technology stack for implementing SOA-based systems, the evolved security stack for SOAP-based web services can serve as reference [13].…”