SOA platforms usually (but not necessarily) have a services gateway. These gateways are meant to have most of the web services registered inside them for controlling access, throttling, statistical measurements, QoS, and service mappings besides other functionalities.

Some of the main and common features of any services gateway include the following:

• HTTP and JMS-based service producers and consumers
• Security (authentication, authorization, certificates, encryption, and so on)
• Validation (for example, WSDL, SOAP Requests, and more)
• Throttling
• Routing (web services routing)
• Service Proxy
• Transformation (for example, from one service to another)
• Caching
• Central logging and reporting (real time and non-real time)
• Mediation (becoming common across gateways)

Note that, with the advent of the REST-based Microservices architecture, API Gateways are becoming more common than the SOA services gateways. We will take a look at the API Gateway in the next chapter.