Pragmatic soa governance

1. Pragmatic SOA Governance

2. • I recently wrote an article that appeared in eBizQ on the topic of SOA
governance. In this article, I argue that the primary reason that many
pundits have declared “SOA is dead” is that the traditional “top-down”
approach to SOA and governance have failed. Vendors have for too long
evangelized a “big bang” re-architecture of development processes, using
their tools to enforce new behaviors from developers, in order to realize
the benefits of SOA. These approaches have failed because they make the
average developer’s life more difficult, rather than simpler. Development
teams, already stretched for time and resources, are generally reluctant to
do extra work in the pursuit of some abstract notion of “service reuse.”
Instead, modern governance approaches that are getting traction today
actually help developers by integrating with existing tools and streamlining,
rather than obstructing, familiar processes.

3. • What I didn’t talk about in the article was some of the real-world activity I
have seen from MuleSource customers. The way our customers use Mule
Galaxy – our SOA governance platform and registry – validates this new
pragmatic approach to governance. For example, one user has
incorporated Galaxy into their software development lifecycle, integrating
their IDE environment using Galaxy’s REST API, making it easy for
developers to find services. This user also stores services in the Galaxy
repository, allowing them to enforce policies around their services,
including WS-I BasicProfile and a number of security policies. Another user
has service metadata defined within Java classes via custom annotations –
using Galaxy and a couple of lines of Groovy code, they are able to
automatically extract this metadata, publishing it in Galaxy for others to
find and reuse. Finally, a third user pushes builds from their continuous
integration system into Galaxy using the Apache Ant build tool, then using
Galaxy to track the lifecycle information of particular application builds and
services. Once a new service was pushed into staging or production,
Galaxy’s application deployment feature (Mule NetBoot) could detect the
change and automatically download and start that service.

4. • In today’s world, it’s clear that the traditional top-down philosophy
for SOA is outmoded and outdated – a new approach is needed for
today’s organizations to see real value. The implications on SOA
governance are clear – the focus should be on making things easier
for everyone*, not about virtuous architecture; on improving existing
organizational structures and processes rather than wholesale re-
engineering; on implementing pragmatic tools at the work-group
level (e.g., using open source tools) rather than embarking on massive
enterprise-wide software implementations. Whether you are calling it
SOA, composite applications, mash-ups, or any other buzzword of the
day, only when the everyday IT professional sees the benefits of a
new approach to development will the enterprise see value overall.

5. • * Historically the role of the developer as a user of an SOA registry
has always been overlooked. Martin Fowler wrote an interesting post
on Humane Registries that touches on ways in which the right
information can be tracked from a developers perspective to make
the tracking of services more useful to developers (yes, Mule Galaxy
supports tracking developer metadata outlined by Martin).