SOA involves exposing modular and independent functions as services so that the service consumer can re-use and build a larger application functionality. Best practice for building services is that they should be reusable, stateless, loosely coupled, and granular and should abstract the inner application logic. SOA is the most popular pattern used in enterprises for applications integration. Key building blocks of SOA are a service provider, service consumer, Universal Description and Discovery Integration (UDDI) registry, and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file containing the service definition.

This pattern applies software elements.