Enterprises look for governance solutions that can help manage their people, processes, and policies. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance brings the arsenal of tools and frameworks that help developers and administrators to more effectively and efficiently manage these aspects of the enterprise. In his WSO2Con 2011 session, Senaka discussed the key concepts of SOA governance, how to incorporate governance in the enterprise, and how the WSO2 Governance Registry can help manage application development, testing and deployment processes, as well as service lifecycles and assets. Here are highlights from his talk.

He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and also a Project Management Committee (PMC) member and committer for a number of projects at the ASF. Senaka founded WSO2 WSF/C++ during his internship at WSO2 in 2008.

Curated on 08th March 2012

Governance for the Enterprise

Effective governance should cover the whole lifecycle, from the inception of a product, service or solution, Senaka advised. Therefore, it requires a proper roadmap for incorporating governance into the enterprise.

“You need a proper way of pushing your idea from the frontline to the reach most employees,” Senaka explained. “It should be simple, easy to adapt and convenient for your employees.” To achieve these goals, he recommended that enterprises adopt governance incrementally and implement it as lean, lightweight process.

Senaka also observed that a good governance solution provides a framework for the SOA. Because one enterprise system often needs to communicate with other systems and inform external parties, including humans, there must be an easy way to create notifications. With SOA governance, notifications trigger whenever an update occurs, informing the relevant authorities that a particular asset type or artifact has been updated.

Lifecycle Management

A key feature of governance is lifecycle management. As organizations grow, the number of workflows and environments increases. SOA governance helps to simplify the approval policies for each workflow and environment. It also encourages lifecycle management and allows for something like a checklist of criteria for service approval to be created.

For instance, Senaka explained, “Before you can put your service into production, you might want to have a checklist saying that: the code is completed, WSDL schemas have been created, and the quality of service attributes have been defined. This is a very simple approval flow, and some of these checklist items should only be clickable by a particular role. Perhaps only your QA team can go and say that this particular asset has been tested.” Senaka added that role-specific testing and approval can be done by extending the default lifecycle configuration.

Since governance encourages a phase design approach, the organizational workflow gets broken down into structures. This enables developers to expand the lifecycle across multiple environments, including test, development, and production. Significantly, the lifecycle also can expand across on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments, Senaka observed.

For example, Senaka said, “You can start evaluating and then creating something, enhance and work on it locally on-premise, and then test it and stage it, and finally put it in production on the cloud.”

“Governance in 2015, we believe, would be more cloud oriented,” Senaka said. “You would have a kind of a local PaaS which is private. You would have a private SaaS infrastructure cloud running, and you would also have a public deployment of the same. So Governance as a Service long-term is what we believe will be useful by 2015.”

To learn more about WSO2’s approach to SOA governance on-premise and in the cloud, view Senaka’s full presentation here.