Top SOA Interview Questions and Answers You Should Practice

Based on the principle of loose coupling, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept that has been around for some time now. It lets services engage through different languages as well as platforms.

When preparing for job interviews, some of the most important topics are SOA principles, features, pitfalls, and skills needed for its adoption. So when studying SOA interview questions, make sure that you cover these.

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To give you a better understanding of the type of SOA interview questions you can expect, in this article, we’ll be covering:

• SOA Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers
• SOA Admin Interview Questions and Answers for Experienced Professionals
• Sample SOA Interview Questions for Practice
• FAQs on SOA Interview Questions

SOA Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers

Some SOA interview questions for freshers that’ll help you in your preparation if you’re applying for entry-level jobs:

1. Define SOA.

SOA is the short form of Service-Oriented Architecture; it is also referred to as the framework used when creating applications for commercial use. When developing these applications, SOA uses loosely coupled strategies during the process. When combined, they help get a good amount of functionality.

2. List the principles on which SOA is based.

SOA is based on the following principles:

• Flexibility
• Re-usability
• Interoperability
• Loose coupling

3. What are some advantages of using SOA?

The advantages of using SOA are:

• With the help of SOA, you can get a much better alignment between IT and line of business and, at the same time, generate more flexibility as well. As the business processes change so swiftly, you’ll need this flexibility that SOA provides.
• SOA helps get better reuse out of your IT investments already in place and even the new services you’re working on currently. Integration of the IT investments becomes much simpler with SOA as it uses well-planned interfaces between services.
• It also offers an architectural model that integrates the business partners’, customers’, and suppliers’ services into a company’s different business processes. This leads to a reduction in costs and elevates customer satisfaction.

4. What are the main features of SOA?

The most salient features of SOA are:

• Separating business functions into services (endpoints). These are then made readily accessible over a network that lets users combine and reuse them in their applications.
• If they follow the SOA principles, SOA services can be developed in multiple languages and OSes.
• Services are unrelated and loosely coupled units that don’t depend directly on one another to function fully. Instead of embedding calls to one another in their source code, they use well-defined protocols that explain how the services pass and parse messages with the help of descriptive metadata.

5. Define a reusable service.

A discoverable, reusable, autonomous, and stateless functionality having the required granularity and can be a part of the composite application/services is known as a reusable service. It can be identified with a business activity that is defined using the service specifications (design-time contract).

These are some of the most often asked SOA interview questions for freshers and should give you an understanding of what to expect.  

SOA Interview Questions and Answers for Experienced Professionals

Given below are some SOA admin interview questions and answers for experienced professionals you can prepare if you’re applying for more advanced roles:

1. What is meant by the composition of the service?

With the help of composition, services combine to produce composite applications. The application includes an aggregation of services in which an enterprise portal is formed.

Essentially, a composite service includes aggregating multiple services that provide reusable services. The service combines electronics components and creates reusable composite services.

2. Define an ESB. Where does it fit in?

ESB is the short form for Enterprise Service Bus. As opposed to other relationships, it provides any-to-any connectivity among different companies. SOA architecture allows SOA to meet all priorities of life.

An integral part of this reference architecture, ESB serves as the backbone of an SOA. However, it can’t be seen as an SOA all by itself.

3. When it comes to SOA, do we need to build a system right from scratch?

The answer is no. If you have to integrate or create an existing system into a business service, you’ll need to build loosely coupled wrappers that’ll wrap your custom systems and expose the functionality of the systems generically to the external world.

This is important in this list of SOA interview questions for experienced professionals, so prepare accordingly.  

4. What are business layers and plumbing layers in SOA?

For easier understanding, SOA architecture can be segmented into two layers. The first one depicts direct relevance to any business and implements different business connections. The second one acts as the technical layer which manages the various computer resources present like a database, web server, etc.

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The differentiation has been so that the identity of any particular service could become apparent. If you think of any simple system as an order management system, it’ll have several components that interact to complete the system.

In this system, these two layers are where the plumbing layer contains the data access layer, AJAX, and several other functionalities.

5. How is loose coupling achieved in an SOA?

One way to achieve loose coupling is by taking the help of the service interface (the WSDL for a SOAP Web Service) to contain this dependency and hide the service implementation from the consumer.

By encapsulating the service functionalities, you can address loose coupling in a way that contains the effect of the changes to the implementation on the service interface. But at some point or the other, you’ll have to change the interface and manage the versioning without affecting service consumers.

This will be done in addition to managing several security constraints, multiple transports, and other considerations.

As you can see, when you apply for mid to advanced-level positions, you can expect these types of SOA interview questions.

Sample SOA Interview Questions for Practice

Some more SOA interview questions to streamline your preparation strategy have been listed below:

1. How would you differentiate between SOA and microservices?
2. What is meant by SOAP?
3. What are SOA governance and its different functions?
4. Define ends, contract, address, and bindings.
5. Would you say that web services and SOA are the same?
6. What are the standard patterns of orchestrating microservices?
7. List some disadvantages of SOA.
8. What are the common pitfalls of SOA?
9. Explain the most vital skill you need to adopt SOA. Is it technical or cultural?
10. Regarding Service identification, which approach is a better fit — top-down or bottom-up methodologies?
11. Differentiate between cohesion and coupling.
12. What is the most accepted transaction strategy for microservices?
13. List the different elements of WSDL documents.
14. What is an element?
15. Explain the different approaches available for developing SOAP-based web services.

If you prepare well and go over all the SOA interview questions given in this article, you’ll better understand what you might have to face in the interviews. Also, if you’re someone looking to up your coding game, read Level Up Your Coding Career With Interview Kickstart.

FAQs on SOA Interview Questions

Q1. What is Oracle SOA used for?

Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive software suite that lets you build, deploy, and manage integrations with the help of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Q2. What are the most important skills needed to adopt SOA technical or cultural?

The answer is cultural, as SOA requires people to think about technology and business differently.

Q3. What is meant by SOA testing?

Testing of the SOA architectural style is known as SOA testing. In this form of testing, the software components are created in a way that communicates through communication protocols, usually using a network.

Q4. What is the SOA example?

SOA can be extremely helpful in improving healthcare delivery. Currently, many apps are games that use inbuilt functions to run. For instance, if an app needs Bluetooth, it uses the inbuilt Bluetooth functions of the device. This is known as SOA in mobile solutions.

Q5. List some SOA interview questions.

Some important SOA interview questions are — Define SOA governance and its functions. What is UDDI? How do you achieve loose coupling in SOA? Are web services and SOA the same? What is a reusable service?

Need Help Preparing SOA Interview Questions?

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