Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance
SOA Governance
The specific focus of SOA governance is on the development of services that add value to the business, effective SOA governance must cover the people, processes, and technologies involved in the entire SOA life cycle from business point of view and connectivity and reuse from IT point of view, thus aligning business with IT.
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You will find books and guides covering the often misunderstood topic of service-oriented architecture (SOA)in our SOA Governance Book Store. The books and guides in this category will help you with every step of SOA, from designing and implementing, to managing and governing an SOA. |
SOA Governance:
- is a concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in an SOA.
- can be seen as a subset of IT governance which itself is a subset of Corporate governance.
- refers to the processes used to govern adoption and implementation of SOA.
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I'll now list some of the key benefits that SOA Governance will bring, as well as potential risks and questions you may want to ask.
Some typical governance issues that are likely to emerge in an SOA are:
- Delivering value to the stakeholders: investments are expected to return a benefit to the stakeholders - this is equally true for SOA
- 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.
Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design;
Executing SOA: A Practical Guide for the Service-Oriented Architect;
