SOA Governance: Exploring Challenges and Benefits From An Autonomic Perspective

Abstract

Both Academy and Industry agree in the importance of having an adequate management of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to adapt and scale to meet the evolving needs of the organization. in order to face this problem, SOA Governance is defined as the set of policies and principles that manage the operations related with the SOA and allow an appropriate evolution aligned with the business goals of the organization. These are both human-oriented and infrastructure-oriented and can be applied within the overall life-cycle of the service: from designtime to run-time. Currently, some seminal works have been proposed to create a reference model for SOA Governance and some infrastructures of Governance have been proposed; current approaches rely on human-oriented tasks in governance without advanced autonomic behaviors. This paper shows SOA Governance automation as a challenge in the autonomic computing area, and analyzes how the different self-* properties of autonomic systems could be applied to this context, identifying desirable capabilities and open issues.