SOA Governance Explained

Question

Does anybody have an idea what SOA Governance is all about? What is the difference (or correlation) between SOA Governance and IT Governance? and How can it be applied using SOA platforms available in the market?

Can a project built on SOA platform be successful without applying SOA Governance? How? I am talking here from a practical point of view.

Answer 1

At its most basic, SOA Governance is about managing services. At its most base level, you might think about topics such as:

• Managing the version of services - Service 1.0 is currently deployed, but now we've deployed Service 1.1. How do we redirect clients from the old service to the new one?
• Giving services a lifecycle: a service is in 'development'. Now it's completed and been QAed, we'll want to transition it to 'production'. We need to have a way to add metadata to the service to indicate that - what if we want to remove our development services but keep our production ones running?

Obviously there are others - there is no hard-and-fast governance solution for any environment. The degree to which governance is necessary is a hot topic of debate.

Disclaimer: I work for IBM as a WebSphere consultant so my thoughts are influenced by that and the IBM product most often suggested as an answer to the above questions, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.