*This article is composed of selected excerpts from actual assets used by HYDRAFT® in the course of client consultations.

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[1. The Beginning of SOA]
The concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) first emerged in the late 1990s and began attracting serious attention in the early 2000s, driven by the rise of standard technologies like XML Web Services. These advancements made it possible to implement SOA in real-world systems, and many enterprises adopted it as a strategy to build more flexible and agile IT infrastructures.

Even today—30 years later—SOA remains one of the most powerful architectural approaches for efficiently integrating and managing diverse systems and applications within complex enterprise IT environments. It wasn't the result of a single individual or company, but rather the natural evolution of the IT industry as a whole. Recently, Microservices Architecture (MSA) has gained significant attention. It can be seen as a modern interpretation of SOA, specifically optimized for cloud environments.

· AWS was born from the philosophy of SOA and carries it forward.
· MSA evolved from SOA and also carries that philosophy forward.
· CSP(Cloud Service Providers or Platform) are essential tools for implementing SOA and MSA strategies.

‍[2. The Background of SOA]
In the 1990s, a prominent development approach was Component-Based Development (CBD). This approach built systems by assembling independently developed components. However, it struggled with issues such as component dependency management, integration complexity, and—perhaps most critically—a significant gap between the abstraction level of development and real-world business requirements.

To address these challenges, the concept of SOA began to emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. SOA attracted attention as a methodology to build IT systems that were more flexible, reusable, and business-process-oriented within distributed computing environments. By tightly linking development artifacts such as use cases and semantic models with actual architectural designs and business definitions, SOA enabled more intuitive and business-aligned system designs.‍

“An approach to building systems composed of a set of reusable components with well-defined interfaces.” — Gartner, 1996

[3. The Emergence of W3C's Web Services Architecture]
In February 2004, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its official Web Services Architecture, based on the principles of SOA. This architecture introduced standards such as WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), using XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The key takeaway: It was now possible to build APIs that enabled interaction and communication between different programming languages and systems using a shared XML-based protocol.

‍[4. The Rise of REST API]
However, W3C’s architecture, based on SOAP and WSDL, proved to be overly complex and heavy for many real-world applications. There was a growing demand for simpler, more lightweight alternatives. This led to the rise of the now-famous REST (Representational State Transfer) API, which commonly uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for data exchange.

REST APIs quickly became the dominant communication method for most web services. However, in environments where high-performance real-time communication is critical—such as between microservices, in streaming applications, or over mobile networks—REST faces limitations in terms of efficiency and performance. In such scenarios, binary-based protocols like gRPC (developed by Google) are increasingly being adopted to meet the demands of modern systems.‍

[5. The Birth of AWS]
When the SOA concept first emerged, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos was one of the first to recognize its potential. In the early 2000s, Amazon began rebuilding its internal systems based on SOA principles. Then in 2006, Amazon unveiled a disruptive business model to the public, leveraging its web service infrastructure and API experience.

This was the birth of AWS (Amazon Web Services)—widely regarded as the world’s first Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. Notably, the name "Amazon Web Services" was a deliberate nod to the SOA philosophy and W3C’s Web Services Architecture. AWS fundamentally reshaped the structure of the web ecosystem and led to the emergence of Cloud Service Providers (CPS) as a new standard in IT infrastructure. Today, leading CPS include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

As I write this, I’m reminded of when I first encountered Jeff Bezos during my early career—through his "Long Tail" theory. Reflecting on it now, his visionary foresight becomes all the more impressive.‍

[6. The Rise and Expansion of MSA]
The SOA philosophy continued to thrive, particularly among certain organizations, developers, and technology communities. This fostered the explosive growth of the cloud ecosystem. Eventually, the unique system architecture patterns of leading tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix were observed and summarized by technology consultant James Lewis. He coined the term MSA to describe a cloud-native adaptation of SOA. Today, MSA is recognized as a standard industry architecture. MSA’s greatest strength lies in reusability and scalability at the service level. For example, a microservice built to handle “product purchase to payment” in Hotel A could be directly reused in:‍

· Shopping Mall B’s web platform
· Mobile App C in the fashion industry
· Third-party seller platforms

This goes beyond simple code reuse or modularity. In MSA, entire service units are self-contained and independently executable. These lightweight services come together to form a complete system. This leads to significant reductions in development time and makes debugging and maintenance more efficient. You only need to modify the affected microservice instead of the entire system. MSA also enhances UX consistency by delivering the same user interface and experience across different platforms. Increasingly, System Integration (SI) businesses are also adopting MSA principles in the cloud—separating instances, applying multi-tenancy and database partitioning strategies—to enhance system flexibility and performance.

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[7. Closing Thoughts]
The transition from SOA to MSA is not merely a story of technological evolution—it is a vital concept that shows us how to adapt and prepare for the era of digital transformation. I hope this summary provides some useful insight as you develop your future business strategies.

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