Many organizations look to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide greater business agility in the face of evolving business requirements and complex, heterogeneous information technology (IT) environments. To achieve this agility, architects implement a Services abstraction that loosely couples business Services from the underlying implementations of those Services. Building such an abstraction layer is not without risks, however-inherent in building such an abstraction is the risk of sacrificing performance and scalability to achieve the organization's required agility.

As SOA becomes mainstream, though, enterprises simply cannot afford to trade away performance to achieve agility. As a result, architects must plan for performance up front, as part of their SOA planning process, and leverage a variety of techniques and solutions to achieve performance and scalability as well as business agility as the traffic to their Services continues to increase.