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Govern Services With Standards
Once you've designed your SOA, a services network should govern all service interactions through emerging and established WS-* standards.
by Frank Martinez

As an SOA grows in scope and function, the need to govern it grows—to govern the myriad potential interactions between disparate, diverse service consumers and providers. Effectively managing how these Web services are deployed, accessed, and shared will become core to the success of the SOA in the enterprise. Necessarily, and not surprisingly, standards are emerging to add uniformity to such policies.

I previously advocated a network-centric architectural approach to SOA, in order to enable reliable, consistent, and predictable communication between Web services deployed across a distributed enterprise (see Resources). This realizes the benefits of SOA better than any other approach because it focuses on global service interoperability and scalability across the enterprise.

I also mentioned that a distributed networking approach to SOA accomplishes the primary goals of an SOA infrastructure: global scalability, efficiency, reliability, and extensibility. But another key advantage to a networking approach is that it provides an optimal mechanism to implement policies that govern interactions with services. As both consumers and providers of services proliferate in the enterprise—surfacing from disparate departments and diverse initial Web services projects, with varying levels of trust and different degrees of priority—the importance of SOA governance will increase exponentially.

SOA Governance in a Services Network
To guarantee adherence to vital policies and encourage enterprise-wide service sharing and reuse, enterprises will rely on SOA governance frameworks to ensure policy compliance for services and the increasingly dynamic interactions between those services (see Table 1).

In a services network, all messages passing between consumers and providers are routed through a network of SOAP routers, which provides the optimal point to uniformly govern all interactions with and between services. The reason is straightforward: The governance intelligence is persisted throughout the network where it can be enacted efficiently and uniformly, rather than housed at numerous, disparate endpoints, adding another "to do" for already overworked developers. Policies can then be easily and globally enforced or implemented during message transit, enabling communication between diverse services through an increasingly "intelligent" network. As a result, any endpoint, from the most self-descriptive to the least, can be incorporated into the network and exposed to consumers throughout the enterprise.

Today, most enterprises are embarking on their SOA journey with a few project-based Web services initiatives that require only a few core standards to be successful—typically WSDL, SOAP, and XML. The good news is that these standards are well-established in practice. Yet, organizations interested in global SOA initiatives will require much deeper, broader standardization to guarantee interoperability within and across departmental boundaries. Thankfully, the lion's share of WS-* standards emerging today involve the standardization of governance policies for the global enterprise (see Table 2).