SOA Governance Explained

Question

Does anybody have an idea what SOA Governance is all about? What is the difference (or correlation) between SOA Governance and IT Governance? and How can it be applied using SOA platforms available in the market?

Can a project built on SOA platform be successful without applying SOA Governance? How? I am talking here from a practical point of view.

Answer 1

See Service Oriented Architecture and SOA Governance for help.

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 a subset of IT governance which itself is a subset of Corporate governance. The focus is on those resources to be leveraged for SOA to deliver value to the business.

SOA needs a solid foundation that is based on standards and includes policies, contracts and service level agreements. The business is expected to be able to use services to build and change the organisations business process quickly. To do so, a degree of granularity in the services available will be required. Consequently an SOA increases the need for good governance as it will help assign decision-making authorities, roles and responsibilities and bring focus to the organisational capabilities needed to be successful.

Answer 2

At its most basic, SOA Governance is about managing services. At its most base level, you might think about topics such as:

• Managing the version of services - Service 1.0 is currently deployed, but now we've deployed Service 1.1. How do we redirect clients from the old service to the new one?
• Giving services a lifecycle: a service is in 'development'. Now it's completed and been QAed, we'll want to transition it to 'production'. We need to have a way to add metadata to the service to indicate that - what if we want to remove our development services but keep our production ones running?

Obviously there are others - there is no hard-and-fast governance solution for any environment. The degree to which governance is necessary is a hot topic of debate.

Disclaimer: I work for IBM as a WebSphere consultant so my thoughts are influenced by that and the IBM product most often suggested as an answer to the above questions, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.

Answer 3

"have an idea what SOA Governance is all about?..."

Andrew Ferrier's response answers this question pretty well. Like any other asset (if you look at services that way), services governance is about controlling the asset. It's similar to code management except on an enterprise level and generally by the business. Access control, versioning, ownership, etc... are all concepts in this space.

"Can a project built on SOA platform be successful without applying SOA Governance?"

That will depend upon your definition of success. However, if you mean can you successfully deploy SOA into an enterprise without governance (with little to no regard on how the service will be managed after it's in production), the answer is a resounding "Yes". Just be aware that at some point in the future, a deployed service in an enterprise WILL eventually be discussed with respect to re-use, accessibility, and ownership (to name a few). That's where governance comes in and you will have to do it manually.

Answer 4

Being an employee of a large enterprise, our SOA governance approach stewards the usage of internal standards such as leveraging a common message format, ensures that all WSDL produced meets security standards such as ensuring that all attributes have regular expressions attached to them for validation and aligns with our strategic business architecture.

Answer 5

SOA Governance can also be two-tiered. Often you spend your time on its internal aspects, but SOA was also meant to address these issues among partnered organizations that may be under entirely separate corporate/government "tents."

Internal stadnards must bend to the will of the larger Community, at least at points of interconnection.