Service-oriented architecture—the notion of using loosely coupled Web services components that can plug into applications as needed to add functionality—remains a solid foundation underlying today’s cloud-based computing.
But the use of REST APIs has superseded enterprise service buses and SOAP-based Web services, so the term SOA has fallen out of favor even as its basic principles remain in use today.
So SOA Software, an early leader in the market, yesterday changed its name to Akana. Roberto Medrano, executive vice president at Akana, said, “SOA has continued to evolve, and we’re making advances in the way we do our business. Many things about SOA still exist out there—agility, reuse—as the underlying elements of how to build software.”
One of the problems with SOA from the provider side is that it was difficult to publish externally, according to Sachin Agarwal, vice president of product marketing at Akana. Today’s cloud environment enables self-service consumption of APIs, he said.
The Akana platform, built on top of the SOA Software platform, provides for API management and security, cloud integration, and more traditional SOA governance, Medrano said. “You need to be able to manage and secure services. You need automated discovery, you need to orchestrate microservices. These are the things the platform provides.”
Akana’s platform delivers an API portal for developers to publish and document APIs and an API Gateway that the company said combines “mediation, orchestration and connectivity capabilities of a lightweight ESB with the performance and security of a traditional proxy-style Gateway.”
It also provides a way to manage APIs and their supporting assets through collaboration between business, developers and IT operations, the company said in the announcement of the name change.
