WebSphere

Governance

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) allows you to govern your processes and services in a secure and efficient way. This section covers the concept of governance in an SOA, and how the ESB enables this concept.

Introduction

In the business world any key asset needs to be carefully managed in order to get the maximum business benefit. In other words, key assets need governance.

The life cycle of a service in an SOA requires governance processes. Governance processes ensure that standards and policies are enforced, and that change occurs in a controlled fashion and with the appropriate authority.

Governance covers the following areas:
  • Aligning business goals with information technology goals
  • Managing resources
  • Managing risk
  • Managing performance
  • Reducing costs

WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository (WSRR)

The scope of governance in an SOA environment extends beyond any single product. However, WSRR is a powerful enabler for SOA governance, and provides a number of mechanisms that you can use to implement the governance processes that have been specified by your business design.

WSRR can be used with the ESB, and provides the following governance capabilities:
  • Business governance. Business governance ensures that your business processes are legal, auditable, and correctly mapped to information technology services. Business governance can include the following features:
    • Policy enforcement and change auditing, using a simple policy life cycle, and status metadata, in the registry.
    • Security to control who can change policies and who can register service providers. WSRR gives you security-based and role-based access control, to metadata managed in the registry.
  • Information technology governance. Information technology governance ensures that updated systems perform as intended, and that no other systems are impacted. Information technology can include the following feature:
    • Life cycle management allows you to categorize services as being in different states. For example, model, assemble, deploy, and manage. Life cycle status is held in the registry. You can use the life cycle status to filter the visibility of services, according to usage and context. You can define a life cycle that includes the categories required by your organization.

Using WSRR with the ESB

In order for the run time to make use of an existing WSRR registry, you need to take the following steps:
  1. Create and configure an SCA module that uses the registry.
    The integration developer creates a mediation flow that contains an Endpoint Lookup mediation primitive or a Policy Resolution mediation primitive, and exports the module in an enterprise archive (EAR) file.
    Note: The governance state is specified on the Classification property of the mediation primitives.
  2. Add the appropriate service endpoints, or mediation policies, to the registry.

    The WSRR administrator loads documents (for example, WSDL or SCA module documents) for the services and policies you want to use.

  3. Make the appropriate WSRR objects governed.

    After the WSRR administrator has made an object governed, the object can be moved from one life cycle state to another. This means that you can store both production level and test level objects in one registry, or store production level versions in the same registry.

  4. Optional: Configure the WSRR entities.

    The WSRR administrator might need to take other actions, depending on what the integration developer has created. For example, on the Endpoint Lookup primitive there might be user-defined properties; these properties let mediation flows retrieve service endpoints that meet specific conditions. In this case, the WSRR administrator would need to create custom properties with a key and a value.

  5. Create and configure a registry definition in the runtime environment.

    The runtime administrator creates a WSRR definition so that the run time knows which instance of WSRR to access. If you are using a secured WSRR, the runtime administrator needs to specify an authentication alias.

  6. Deploy the SCA module.

    The runtime administrator installs the EAR file containing the mediation flow.


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Timestamp icon Last updated: 20 June 2010 00:38:40 BST (DRAFT)


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