Whenever someone talks about a services-based architecture, they often mention scalability, often in the same breath. However, it seems that using services adds more overhead, rather than reducing it, since there is now a protocol, like SOAP or REST, involved. So, does a web services based architecture really add performance benefits as the number of users of, say, a web application, scales by perhaps an order of magnitude? Or are the scalability requirements simply offloaded onto the services, rather than the core application?
Whenever someone talks about a services-based architecture, they often mention scalability, often in the
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Scalability and performance are two separate things. Yes, a service based approach does add the overhead of a network protocol, but this is a minimal sacrifice for the benefits of being able to rapidly adopt well-tested services in any application on the domain.
If the overhead of the network is a deal-breaker for the system you want to build then clearly SOA is the wrong choice for you. Remember that not ever service must be accessed over HTTP. I think you would be surprised how fast some protocols (like
net.tcp) can be.