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

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 2

SOA governance is a subset of IT governance where you focus on defining, delivering and enforcing IT governance rules using SOA. It is also organization wide, otherwise it is practically pointless except as an exercise.

IT Governance which is a subset of Corporate governance and should have at least a policy of providing Business Value in things that the company does.

Here's an example:

1. Provide Business Value (corporate policy)
2. by providing consistent quality of service (corporate policy)
3. by providing metrics for each procedure (IT governance)
4. by providing transaction times for each service operation (SOA governance)

As you drill down things get more technical and actually easier to enforce.

SOA/IT/Corporate governance is basically analogous to the law makers (those who define the rules), the judge/police (those who enforce the rules), the rest of us (those who deliver within the rules).

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

First, let's figure out What is Governance?

Governance is the process of ensuring that an organization's resource are utilized in a manner in which they contribute to the fulfillment of an organization's goal and it is done in a transparent and measurable manner.The resources can include both people , processes or other physical infrastructure.At the heart of Governance is the concept of controlling how decisions are made.There are a number of different types of Governance:

• Corporate Governance
• IT Governance
• Architecture Governance
• SOA Governance
• SDLC Governance

Why has Governance become important?

The past decade has brought to light several corporate scandals that highlight the pitfalls when decisions are made without transparency and accountability. As an example in the late 90s the corporate IT departments initiated a number of IT projects based on the whimsical notion of staying on the bleeding edge without any clear motivation on how these projects would contribute to the business.

What are the building blocks of Governance?

• Precepts
• People
• Processes
• Metrics

To find more about what is SOA Governance, Please find this post.

References

1. Prentice.Hall.SOA.Governance.Governing.Shared.Services.On-Premise.and.in.the.Cloud.Apr.2011.ebookmf.com

2. SOA Governance in Action

3. Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

Answer 5

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 6

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 7

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.

Answer 8

From a practical point of view...

Does anybody have an idea what SOA Governance is all about?

It involves:

• Defining design standards and governance infrastructure for services (e.g., SOAP and REST services). The governance infrastructure is mainly a service registry.
• Establishing roles, responsibilities, and processes regarding the lifecycle of services. Example: a service custodian is responsible for adding a description of a new service to the service registry; a schema custodian will enforce the canonical schema design pattern.
• Establishing a SOA Governance system, which is in practice a document with all governance directives. The document should be approved by upper mgmt (e.g., CIO).

What is the difference (or correlation) between SOA Governance and IT Governance?

IT governance is broader and spans from procurement of workstation to training software developers. SOA governance focuses on software services, such as SOAP and REST services. IT governance should encompass SOA governance, if the organization has adopted SOA.

How can it be applied using SOA platforms available in the market?

Platforms that support the development and execution of "SOA services" are necessary, of course, for creating and running SOAP and REST services. But the fact that you're creating SOAP or REST services doesn't mean you're following service orientation. Likewise, using ESBs or orchestration servers doesn't mean you're doing SOA the right way. Successful SOA is not only about technology, but also about governance and architecture (understanding and applying service orientation principles and SOA design patterns).

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

Yes, it can! The main goal of SOA governance is to enable long-term benefits due to reuse, interoperability, standardization and other nice properties of services across applications. SOA governance helps your organization to have enterprise focus rather than application focus.