Service-oriented architecture is an architectural style of web services. It defines some standards and lays down best approaches to design and develop a web service. Any web service is the logical representation of repeatable business activities that have a specified outcome, such as retrieving a weather report for a particular city, accessing stock prices for a given stock, updating a record to an inventory service, and so on. SOA is self-contained, and also provides guidelines to combine a service with other services as well. Another fact about SOA is that it is a black box (or abstract) to the service consumer who consumes it.

In short, SOA is essentially a collection of services, those services communicate with each other, and a service is an operation or a function that is well defined, self-contained, and independent of other service contexts and states. Services are applications hosted on application servers and interact with other applications through interfaces.