Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

9.9. RUN TIME

The third phase of the governance technology enforcement tier is focused on the runtime environment for the services. During this phase both internal and external entities may consume the services provided by the enterprise. For consumers to utilize these enterprise services effectively, they must be published and discoverable in a complete and consistent manner. Because of the nature of a runtime environment, runtime governance requirements include:

• Enforce policies during service consumption.

• For internal services, enforce internal policies, monitor services, feedback.

• For external services, enforce policies using minimal acceptance criteria to allow consumption of external services.

• Collect metrics and harvest best practices to influence SOA policies that apply to other phases of a service lifecycle.

Enforcing policies in an automated fashion using various technology solutions is essential for runtime SOA policy enforcement. SOA policy enforcement requires the appropriate enabling technology including tools such as service registries and repositories, intermediaries such as Web services management tools, policy validation engines, and distributed enforcement points like XML firewalls and load balancer devices, be used to efficiently enforce policies at the right place in the architecture.

In this section, we will discuss the enforcement of policies from three perspectives:

1. Providing services for both internal and external consumers

2. Consuming internal services, and ...