A service repository for SOA governance

Businesses must evolve and adapt to the world of rapidly changing technology. To create an efficient ecosystem, companies must move beyond their four walls and connect their business processes, services, and applications to the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) adoption and the growth in the number of available APIs are fueling this in many ways, opening doors for more connectivity across disparate systems and services. Moreover, as new devices and delivery channels emerge, the need for integration, scalability, and management follows.

In a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), business processes are leveraged repeatedly to perform functions as needed. Small pieces of code known as services work to accomplish specific tasks. SOA provides these services an entirely new scope of functionality, making it easy to call upon them to perform processes when necessary. For this to work smoothly, applications and services must be easily located, understood, and consumed. Implementing SOA is critical for organizations to ensure they remain innovative and at the forefront of their industries.

With the changing IT landscape, it is more important than ever to ensure service oriented architecture aligns with best practices, policies, and regulations. SOA ecosystems need a next generation SOA integration solution to allow for seamless management of services throughout their lifecycles as well as monitoring of performance and enforcing of standards, policies, and contracts.

As mentioned, SOA architecture consists of numerous interoperating parts. Working together, these parts not only ensure business processes are complete, they also provide visibility and control. Businesses gain visibility from SOA components such as a service registry, which provides metadata about services, reuse, management, and business agility. Establishing working interoperability between devices, partners, suppliers, and employees both on-premises and in the cloud while maintaining visibility and insight is critical and often a difficult task. Without an efficient SOA providing seamless connectivity across the enterprise, businesses suffer greatly.

Moreover, as company needs change, complexity increases. Businesses need a future-proof solution to provide the flexibility they need to accommodate their changing requirements. Without a future-proof solution, organizations have a hard time promoting reuse of existing services and enforcing compliance. Because SOA initiatives are often complex, they are difficult to scale with the business, making the complete  implementation of an SOA strategy very difficult.

Businesses lack a centralized platform in which services and related artifacts can be managed, promoted, reused, and controlled. A service registry, a term often used interchangeably with service repository, provides organizations a solution to overcome the challenges surrounding SOA architecture. Without a service repository or registry, organizations lack consistency and governance of enterprise services and have difficulties locating services to solve existing problems. Moreover, proprietary software creates a tightly coupled and complicated environment for service consumers and providers, making it difficult for them to interact and communicate.

Addressing the challenges of SOA architecture requires a future-proof platform to establish SOA governance. An SOA Governance solution makes it easy to create, enforce, and monitor policies, contracts, and SLAs within service oriented architecture.

MuleSoft offers Anypoint™ service registry to take on the governance challenges surrounding service oriented architecture. The service repository/registry functions as the primary driver behind SOA governance, providing centralized location to store services and applications, as well as information regarding their relationship. The repository aids businesses in managing internal and external services residing on-premises or in the cloud through a single platform. This gives businesses room to focus more on driving business forward, and less on the hassles of governance.

The service registry and repository provides business visibility, location transparency, and control to deliver on the promise of SOA, provide flexibility and agility, ensure compliance, and mitigate risk. MuleSoft Anypoint Service Registry is composed of a number of parts working together to ensure services within SOA architecture run smoothly.

• Policy manager: Serving as a command center for policy management, this module makes it easy to create, delete, and manage policies. Moreover, with policy manager, making changes to policies without interrupting services is simple. Policy manager makes it easy to apply policies to services and simplifies end-to-end lifecycle management.
• Contract manager: Contracts can be created, removed, defined, implemented, and managed with contract manager. Consumers and service providers have access to make necessary changes. Once set up, Service Registry can easily monitor and ensure terms are enforced accordingly.
• Service analytics: Service analytics provides real-time insight into the performance of each service application, giving organizations the ability to monitor things such as number of consumers, traffic, utilizations, availability, and uptime. Businesses have complete visibility into what goes on within services.
• Service virtualizer: Provide location transparency with service virtualizer and shield consumers from change. With this module, making and implementing new changes can be done seamlessly, without affecting consumers.
• Service repository: The heart of Anypoint Service Registry is the service repository itself which catalogues applications and services, making it easy to search and browse. The service repository provides businesses centralized service management, promoting reuse and hindering duplication.

In order to reduce complexity and mitigate risk, SOA Governance is crucial. With Anypoint Service Registry, enterprises can better support their environments and govern services from a single platform. Moreover, because Anypoint Service Registry is cloud based, the TCO is much lower than other service repository or registry solutions. Its flexibility, agility, and security make it a robust future-proof solution for organizations looking for a next generation SOA Governance platform.

Learn more about Anypoint Service Registry or contact us today to get started. Watch our “SOA Governance best practices” webinar below to build a better understanding of the challenges associated with SOA.