Without doubt, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of the most important topics on the agenda of any IT person. SOA involves a new vision of how to design, develop, and manage applications, but also puts new requirements on the underlying infrastructure.

This Redpaper IBM Redbooks publication describes the infrastructure challenges that SOA brings to the table and how the IBM System z platform and the z/OS operating system address those challenges. An effective SOA implementation requires very high Quality of Services (QoS) from the underlying environment, and users demand security, availability, and simplified management of the services. These are fundamental characteristics of System z and z/OS, making them an ideal platform on which to design an SOA.

This paper presents an overview of SOA, describes the SOA reference architecture, and demonstrates how IBM System z and z/OS support the SOA requirements. Finally, it suggests an approach for SOA-enabling existing applications and provides several integration scenarios.

Chapter 1. What is SOA and why do we need it?

Chapter 2. SOA reference architecture

Chapter 3. SOA and z/OS

Chapter 4. The SOA journey on z/OS