SOA Governance

Webinar on SOA Governance: Where the Rubber Meets the Runtime

What is SOA governance? Find out how it relates to policy-setting and compliance in your Web services environment – and how it is essential to the functioning of your network from development through deployment and test – and especially during runtime.

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SOA Governance: Where the Rubber Meets the Runtime

SOA governance -- in development, deployment and runtime -- together with an in-depth discussion of policy and policy enforcement in the world of service-oriented architecture, is the subject of this tutorial. The reader will benefit from both a scholarly exposition of the material combined with real-world SOA case studies.

What is SOA Governance?

What is SOA governance, exactly? Governance is a word frequently used by vendors and analysts, but there isn't a lot of clarity around what is meant by it.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will use this working definition for governance: "The systems and processes in place for ensuring proper accountability and openness in the conduct of an organization's business."

Notice how this definition doesn't say anything about rules, or top-down management; governance is simply about steering the organization so that it heads in the right direction. The word, in fact, derives from Latin origins and suggests the notion of steering.

How is SOA Governance Usually Handled?

...Either in technology or more broadly throughout an organization? Classically, governance involves a set of rules and regulations that one expects the organization to be bound by, for example:

  • Policies are made available to everyone
  • Everyone reads all the policies
  • Everyone follows all the policies

In the "good old days", these policies might be contained in three-ring binders, or PDFs on an intranet that were handed out at employee orientations and updated infrequently. The notion here is that everybody is given a set of policies that the organization assumes people will read and then people will follow in a consistent way. The reality of course is that doesn't really happen ...

How many people, in the typical organization, know, understand and follow every rule at all times that might apply to them, which has either been handed to them directly or indirectly? And how many of these people are aware of the rules when they change?

Approaches to Automating SOA Governance

As we discuss IT and SOA governance -- ensuring that the operations of the business comply with expected guidelines -- the approaches are often very similar to the other aspects of governance within an organization, where people lay out rules and regulations and then simply assume they will be followed.

There are at least two aspects of SOA governance that are relevant here:

  • Development-Time Governance: Providing development, testing and simulation tools for developers, so that they can test their Web services and verify that their behavior is what is expected of them.
  • Deployment-Time Governance: Automated validation of services against defined rules and definitions and their deployment through use of a registry so that at least, in theory, all deployed services are known and tracked. The theory is that nothing can be deployed unless approved: nothing unexpected can occur as a result of having deployed the registry.

SOA Governance Tutorial: Table of Contents

While tactical development- and deployment-time approaches are certainly highly valuable and necessary components of an overall governance strategy, of themselves they are not sufficient to meet the organization's total SOA governance objectives. To meet this need, the organization must address runtime management and policy concerns. These items will form much of the balance of this tutorial:

For More Information

Want to know more about SOA governance? Register to download this complete archived webinar entitled: SOA Governance — Where the Rubber Meets the Runtime.