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SOA Governance
In modern enterprises, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) should properly "steer" its enterprise IT system. This process is called "SOA Governance". Governance is derived from the Latin term for steering. It is hard to find a concrete definition for SOA Governance, as the term heavily depends on a multitude of factors. People tend to define SOA Governance differently.
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Runtime governance comes into play, soon after the service is deployed. It monitors operational aspects of a service (service performance bottle necks, who is accessing more, etc.). Unlike design-time governance, most runtime governance functions are automated. Reports generated in this phase are important feedback, for the next service design and development iteration.
Registries and Repositories
To enable SOA governance, software industry responded with two different categories of tools:
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- Record information on services
- Search for an existing service for reuse
- Discover associations and dependencies of a service
- Enforce policies throughout the service lifecycle
- User access control
- Automatic version control
- An SDK for registry-repository extensibility
Assets
WSO2 Governance Registry stores governance metadata and information on governance related entities. Registry resources storing this information and/or metadata are known as assets. With Service metadata, you can import most of the information which is separately stored in the WEB in to the Governance Registry, and manage them as Governance Registry Resources.
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WSO2 Governance Registry facilitates two types of assets: in-built and custom. For more information on these assets, see Adding Assets.
Cataloging, searching and categorization
Publishing assets
The WSO2 Governance Registry allows you to add services through its Web-based user interface. User can choose either to enter service details manually or to import service information using a WSDL url. For more information see Governance Artifact Configurations.
It is also possible to validate a resource's compliance with standards such as WSDL, XSD and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I). Validation capabilities help improve the quality of resources. Validation tools are also an important aspect of policy enforcement, where you can enforce resources validation at specific points of a resource life cycle. See also Managing Properties.
Discovering assets
The WSO2 Governance Registry offers configurations options such as tags, comments, properties, ratings and descriptions for a resource. It is important to plan the use of these configurations, to allow them help in discovering services and enabling correct SOA Governance.
Resources for service discovering tremendously help in service reuse. In fact, it is one of the major functions of a registry-repository product. The WSO2 Governance Registry provides enhanced search capabilities to facilitate search based on tags and other advanced criteria. See also Resources.
Asset lifecycle management
Typically many resources in your Registry, such as service descriptions, should progress through a series of "lifecycle stages". For instance, a service may start off as "created", then after quality assurance has confirmed that the service works as expected should be moved to "tested" stage. Upon testing, the service can then move to a "deployed" stage at which point it is released to production. Eventually, the service will be taken down or replaced with another as it moves to a "deprecated" state. Furthermore, registry allows users to define a checklist for stage transitions.
The WSO2 Governance Registry makes using and managing state-based lifecycle easy. Out of the box, the Registry comes with a default lifecycle that implements the state transitions explained earlier. You can define your own custom lifecycles with conditional state transitions, in order to match you/your organization's very specific requirements. See also Lifecycles.
SOA governance
SOA governance is a set of processes, responsibilities and tools that reinforces good behavior and help avoid bad behaviors. or more information on SOA governance, see Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance.
Policy management
The WSO2 Governance Registry offers user authentication and authorization capabilities over all resources stored in the Registry. Easily configurable role based user management allows define, "who can accessing what?" within the Registry. Furthermore, the Registry provides activity logs that shows user activities over resources. You can apply filters on the top of activity logs to extract customized data to suite your information needs. See also Managing Role Permissions.
Impact analysis
The Registry supports configuring of dependencies and associations for resources. It automatically detects certain dependencies when you publish a resource. For example, a WSDL might use an external XSD that can be automatically detected and imported to the Registry. In addition to dependencies, the Registry provide a way to configure associations among resources. You are free to specify the type of association such as "contains" or "uses" during association configuration. These associations help figure out the possible relationships that may exist among resources and also in analyzing the impact on changing a resource. See also Managing Dependencies and Associations.
API management
Subscriptions management
Notifications
Reporting
Monitoring
Interoperability
Extensibility
The WSO2 Governance Registry provides three extension points that provide a flexible, plug-in approach to link resources and to allow users to encode their own governance rules and policies. These include:
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