SOA Governance
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Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance is a concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in an SOA. SOA governance can be seen as an overlay on IT governance, but its focus is more organizational, since services are closely related to business activities. Also, loose coupling and the smaller granularity of services in an SOA increase the demand for good governance.
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[edit] Definition
The definitions of SOA governance agree in its purpose of exercising control, but differ in the responsibilities it should have. Some narrow definitions focus on imposing policies and monitoring services, while other definitions use a broader business-oriented perspective.
Anne Thomas Manes defines governance as: “[T]he processes that an enterprise puts in place to ensure that things are done ... in accordance with best practices, architectural principles, government regulations, laws, and other determining factors. SOA governance refers to the processes used to govern adoption and implementation of SOA.” [1]
While the specific focus of SOA governance is on the development and use of services, effective SOA governance must cover the people, processes, and technologies involved in the entire SOA life cycle.
To quote Anne Thomas Manes again: “SOA is about behavior, not something you build or buy. You have to change behavior to make it effective.” [2]
Gartner defines SOA Governance as “Ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are acting as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality.” [3]
18 SOA Governance Definitions by industry analysts, members of the media and users are available at the SOA Governance Resource Guide
[edit] Scope of SOA governance
Some typical governance issues that are likely to emerge in an SOA are:
- Compliance to standards or laws: IT systems require auditing to prove their compliance to regulations like [Sarbanes-Oxley]. In an SOA, service behavior is often unknown
- Change management: changing a service often has unforeseen consequences as the service consumers are unknown to the service providers. This makes an impact analysis for changing a service more difficult than usual.
- Ensuring quality of services: The flexibility of SOA to add new services requires extra attention for the quality of these services. This concerns both the quality of design and the quality of service. As services often call upon other services, one malfunctioning service can cause damage in many applications.
Some key activities that are often mentioned as being part of SOA governance are:
- Managing the portfolio of services: planning development of new services and updating current services
- Managing the service lifecycle: meant to ensure that updates of services do not disturb current service consumers
- Using policies to restrict behavior: rules can be created that all services need to apply to, to ensure consistency of services
- Monitoring performance of services: because of service composition, the consequences of service downtime or underperformance can be severe. By monitoring service performance and availability, action can be taken instantly when a problem occurs.
Examples of and information from many user implementations of SOA Governance are available at the SOA Governance Resource Guide - SOA Governance Success Stories section
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Anne Thomas Manes, The Elephant Has Left The Building, 1 July 2005
- ^ Philip J. Windley, SOA Governance: Rules of the Game, InfoWorld.com, 23 January 2006
- ^ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance, 2007
