SOA Governance

What is SOA Governance?

SOA governance refers to the processes used to oversee and control the adoption and implementation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in accordance with recognized practices, principles and government regulations.

SOA governance consists of three major components:
a registry, a policy and a testing procedure:

• SOA registry is an evolving catalog of information about the available services in the SOA implementation. The registry allows businesses to efficiently discover and communicate with each other.
• SOA policy is a set of behavioral restrictions intended to ensure that services remain consistent and do not conflict with each other. These constraints also ensure that good engineering practices, common-sense customer relations principles and government laws are followed. A specific person may be designated to grant occasional policy exceptions.
• SOA testing is a comprehensive schedule of audits and performance-monitoring procedures intended to ensure that the entire SOA solution is efficient, cost-effective, secure and up-to-date.

Features of SOA Governance

v  Automated discovery, mapping, and management of the service inventory and associated relationships

v  Visualization of services and composite applications runtime and design time

v  Access to services in production, plus those still in development

v  Visibility, lifecycle, and change management of assets and applied policies

v  Enforcement of governance via approvals and policy management

v  Tracking and reporting of reuse throughout the entire service lifecycle

v  Support for critical decisions based on compliance, performance, and ROI metrics