How can SOAs be policy-governed? |
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EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Brian Connell
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QUESTION POSED ON: 17 June 2003
SOA are said to be contract-defined and policy-governed. What type of technologies are available today to define the contract? What are the "holes"? How can SOAs be policy-governed ?
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The concepts of contracts and policies are not new, and are used extensively by some technologies to control many aspects of interactions between different components and applications. For example, CORBA interface definition language (IDL) is a contract between distributed object components that defines many elements of the interaction. Also, many security products implement access control using policies to govern the conditions that affect authentication and authorization.
In a services-oriented architecture it is necessary to supervise and control interactions between service providers and service requesters. A policy defines the rules and conditions that affect service delivery, and is often used to differentiate service delivery to different providers. A contract forms the basis of guarantees from the provider to the requester regarding conditions of service delivery.
The technology required to implement policies are a contract/policy manager (design) and a contract/policy engine (runtime). In general, service policies are used to monitor and control service level agreements, response time and availability, routing and prioritization.
Future work in this area should be the standardisation of policy definitions using mechanisms such as WS-Policy, and the definition of elements that may effect service delivery. Ideally, the industry should aim for a standard service-oriented management policy that can be exchanged between policy engines from different vendors.
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