SOA Governance Framework – WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0

SOA Governance has become a hot topic in most of the software houses, for some the value of it has matters and for some it is a trend. By looking at the complex/enterprise level SOA systems the need of governance has become vital. Same time the rapid growth of the systems and sub-systems make governance a important factor of the SOA infrastructure.

Governance is the high-level framework that fir the say to day system management, configuration and monitoring of the SOA infrastructure. Governance built with three elements People, Processes and Policies. People describes the system users and the associated systems, Processes are the verbs/activities of the system and policies are do connect people with processes by bringing control.
When talking about SOA governance a framework is essential to build and govern the infrastructure. WSO2 Governance Registry is a very powerful governance framework that can find in the market. It is opensource, user friendly with a rich GUI, functionality rich including the governance fundamentals, built with open standers to connect, communicate and use with other systems.
By keeping 3Ps (People, Processes, Policies) in a side I would like to divide governance in to different layers, Metadata, Control and Monitor.
Metadata contains the service metadata (WSDL, Schema, Policies etc ..)and configuration metadata. WSO2 Governance registry provides a comprehensive repository with a resource browser GUI to store and organize metadata. Resources and collections are the main components that used to store content. A metadata structure can be created based on the need by mapping to a organization structure or a project structure. Not only the service metadata services can be store in the repository as well and make associations with the service metadata. Metadata can be versioned for maintenance and can tag for quick search. Association and dependencies can be used to achieve the semantic view of metadata. Repositories can be connect together and can get an aggregated view by using the registry federation capabilities of the WSO2 Governance Registry. WSO2 Governance Registry comes with some inbuilt media types and the open api provides the facility to add additional media-types on preference by the user.
Control section covers several things including the people aspects. Using the user manager a complete organizational user database can be created or can link to an existing external user store. Existing user stores can be LDAP, AD, ADAM or RDBMS. Users, roles and permissions can be used to map the people with many policies. Validations are another set of important element under control. WS-I, WSDL, Schema validations are some example validations comes with the WSO2 Governance Registry and user can add any validation and associate it with the relevant media-type. Lifecycles can be used to control meta-data and provide a state to metadata.
Monitoring is the third category and a key factor in the governance framework. WSO2 Governance registry provides eventing based notifications that can be received in deferent medias including email, SOAP, GUI, logs etc. Product contains a comprehensive dashboard built with customizable gadgets that can configure to monitor applications in the SOA infrastructure (eg. ESB, Service Hosting Container).
WSO2 Governance Registry provides an ATOM based remote API as well as a WS interface for external communication, it contains the command line tools that can use to export, import content from the registry.
WSO2 Governance Registry can be used as a publish instance as well as a discovery instance. Best way to try out these features, to download WSO2 Governance Registry.