Last week, I posted details from the latest ebizQ survey that demonstrated a that runtime automation tools greatly improved overall satisfaction with SOA governance efforts.
What, exactly, is at the root of this satisfaction? Dan Foody, CTO of Actional and Sonic products for Progress Software, recently described the "blind spots" that runtime automation tools help to overcome.
Blind Spot 1: Service Behavior. While development and deployment time governance tools can validate metadata such as WSDL and message content, they can't validate that a service behaves according to the rules, Foody says. Runtime governance tools enable you to "point and click to declare auditing, security, and other policy behaviors."
Blind Spot 2: Process Awareness. "Every time a service is reused, it essentially becomes part of a new application - a new business process - and that business process may have an entirely new set of rules to obey... You can't assume that development and deployment time governance checks on a service are enough." Here, Foody says, runtime governance tools can apply their governance policies not only to individual services, but across entire end-to-end business processes, regardless of when the services were deployed.
Blind Spot 3: Rogue Services. Don't assume that every service goes into production after a proper review process, Foody advises. The result is "rogue services" (or "junk services" as Ben Moreland called them, per my previous posting on this site). A runtime governance product can track the presence of such services in the registry, as well as applications using the service. "The most advanced runtime governance products can even automatically quarantine rogue services and service uses until they're approved - eliminating the risk of rogue services," he said.
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