SOA governance

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) consists of packaging business logic into services and making them accessible to applications, services, and users for reuse across the business. Each service in the SOA ecosystem is essentially a packaged business process, and the code developed to support that business process can be leveraged again and again, rather than rebuilt and duplicated in every application that needs to perform that function. To make this work, services need to be easy to find, easy to understand, and must interoperate with a heterogeneous set of technologies without code modifications. Moreover, they must ensure that business is conducted consistently and in accordance with best practices, business policies, and regional regulations and laws.

Service oriented architecture today consists of numerous technologies and web services, some of which reside in the cloud, while others remain on-premises. Additionally, there exists a wide assortment of consumer types, ranging from internal applications and users to SaaS applications and mobile device users. With a variety of technologies, systems, and services trying to work together, ensuring seamless interoperability can be a difficult task.

In addition to the challenge of managing a variety of technologies and service consumers, the situation grows even more complex when, inevitably, business requirements change. Growing businesses need a future-proof solution that allows them to adapt quickly as their business needs change. Service-oriented architecture needs to connect people, processes, and technology across a distributed enterprise seamlessly, all the while certifying that corporate and regulatory policies are consistently applied and services are secure. With numerous technologies to contend with and the rapid rate of business change, SOA initiatives tend to be large and complex undertakings.

As a result, companies face many challenges in implementing an SOA integration solution. In order to get the most of a service-oriented architecture, deliver value to the business, and maintain control of the services ecosystem, it is vital to establish some form of SOA governance. A successful deployment of service-oriented architecture requires a solid foundation that makes it easy to create, apply, and monitor standards, policies, contracts, and service level agreements (SLAs). Businesses need a solution with powerful capabilities and intuitive tools that make SOA governance easy. Without such a solution, it is virtually impossible to promote service reuse, ensure compliance with policies, contracts, and best practices, and to maintain visibility into the services ecosystem.

To address these challenges, MuleSoft offers Anypoint™ Service Registry, a governance platform designed for the New Enterprise. While governance initiatives are generally driven by the need to govern internal services, these services are no longer destined to be consumed solely by internal consumers. Today, businesses extend well beyond their four walls to include customers, partners, and consumers who need to access services in the course of doing business.

Anypoint Service Registry is no ordinary SOA governance platform - it was designed with the New Enterprise in mind. As a result, it offers a roadmap to API enabling governed services for consumption by external parties. Leading industry analysts have recognized this shift and are referring to the blending of SOA governance and API management as Application Services Governance. This new technology category views SOA governance and API management as a continuum that is best supported by a single unified platform. Anypoint Service Registry is built to govern both services and APIs such as REST, SOAP, and legacy systems. With Anypoint Service Registry, managing internal and external service assets, whether they reside on-premises or in the cloud, is possible through a single platform.

Anypoint Service Registry delivers a set of capabilities that ensure visibility, compliance, and agility. What’s more, it does so while lowering the risk of downtime and security breaches better than other solutions on the market.

Prevent duplication by managing services and endpoints in the Service Repository. Service Repository serves as a centralized catalog for services, policies, consumers, applications, and contracts, as well as the relationships between them. Moreover, Service Repository provides an accurate view of services, making it easy to evaluate assets for tasks, thereby encouraging reuse.

Service Virtualizer shields consumers from change by providing location transparency; making it easy to modify service location and migration between cloud and on-premises environments. Providing a level of abstraction between service providers and consumers, Service Virtualizer handles requests to identify the correct service and version needed.

Serving as a command and control center for policy management, Policy Manager makes it easy to create and apply policies to ensure security, quality, and compliance. Policies can easily be added, removed, or updated without interruption to consumers and with immediate results.

Access real-time data through a single, graphical dashboard. Service Analytics makes it easy to monitor availability, traffic, response time, and number of consumers per service. Service Analytics provides the tools to help businesses answer critical questions (e.g. Who is my top consumer?, Which applications are using a specific service the most? How does a service compare to the SLA contracted?). Service Analytics makes it easy to monitor all of your service KPIs, including performance against SLAs and consumption metrics in a single place.

Define and enforce contracts to ensure different service levels. With Contract Manager, prospective consumers can request access, specify service levels, and negotiate terms for services. Once defined, Anypoint Service Registry monitors services to enforce terms.

In addition, Service Registry also comes with all of the security, availability, reliability, and performance features businesses have come to expect from MuleSoft. Anypoint Enterprise Security protects service endpoints from security threats and vulnerabilities. High-availability ensures 100% uptime for integration ecosystems. Because it is a cloud-based solution, the TCO of Anypoint Service Registry is lower than other SOA governance solutions, as there is no infrastructure to deploy and no costly upgrades to implement.

Whether you are a service owner or a consumer, Anypoint Service Registry makes it easy to manage services throughout their lifecycle, monitor performance, and enforce standards, policies and contracts. By automating application services governance, businesses can spend less time worrying about policies and standards, and more time focusing on driving innovation in the business. Moreover, Anypoint Service Registry is designed to interoperate with Mule as an ESB or CloudHub to provide further benefits.

MuleSoft offers a solid SOA Governance framework to support the New Enterprise with Anypoint Service Registry. Learn more about what Anypoint Service Registry has to offer, or contact us today to get started.

Also, watch our webinar below, “SOA Governance best practices” to learn more about overcoming the challenges of SOA Governance, best practices, and watch a live demo of Anypoint Service Registry.