Chapter 1. Introducing SOA governance
This chapter covers
- The core concepts of SOA governance
- Why SOA governance is important
- What roles tooling and open source play in SOA governance
- How SOA governance can be applied on the organization level
Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, governance involves the process of creating a set of guidelines with which your services need to comply. When you apply good SOA governance practices, you can create high-quality services that can be easily used by your consumers and that behave exactly as expected. With SOA governance it’s easier to create new services, upgrade existing ones, and monitor the customer and business use of your services.
When people first hear about SOA governance, they often think of large organizations, heavy processes, and lots of paperwork that pretty much prevents you, as a developer, from getting any work done. If you’ve read any of the books that have SOA governance in the title, this view will be somewhat confirmed. SOA governance, especially the governance part, sounds heavy and restrictive, and this can quickly scare people. But don’t worry; as you’ll see in this book, applying SOA governance principles is easy and not so different from the normal way you design or monitor the services you’ve created.