At AmberPoint, we understand that effective governance calls for much more than a collection of software tools. Rather, governance is the complete set of activities undertaken by an IT organization to ensure a smooth adoption of SOA across the enterprise. It's about managing people and processes associated with an SOA system. Enterprises might deploy registries, repositories or home-grown asset databases as part of their governance initiatives. They might also orchestrate governance workflows using their preferred business process management tools.

Properly done, SOA governance ensures that application components are designed and developed according to the principles and standards of SOA such that they are interoperable and reusable. It also coordinates various service producers, consumers, groups and individuals within the organization so that component reuse is maximized and disruptions are kept to a minimum.

AmberPoint provides the runtime visibility and control necessary to put effective SOA governance into action.

Automated Application Discovery

AmberPoint automatically discovers the application components deployed within an SOA environment, as well as the dependences between those components. It bootstraps governance processes by automatically publishing this information to registries or repositories. AmberPoint also periodically updates these stores to keep the data up to date.

The resulting runtime SOA blueprint enables architects and managers to ensure that only approved application components are deployed within their environments. It also helps them to weed-out "unapproved" or "rogue services" and submit them to a governance process. Runtime dependency information is particularly useful for service impact analysis.

As the SOA environment evolves, AmberPoint's ongoing discovery ensures that enterprises always have the most timely and accurate understanding of their SOA deployments.

AmberPoint also displays the interdependencies among application components. It provides an informative view of the SOA network and its live relationships to help manage the complex dependencies inherent to loosely-coupled business systems.

AmberPoint's auto-discovery and dependency tracking capabilities, combined with comprehensive capabilities for controling SOA systems, brings tangible benefits across an organization—including the developers building SOA application components. By sharing real-time evaluative data, AmberPoint helps gain the cooperation of developers who might otherwise forego governance processes.

SOA Policy Management

AmberPoint automates policy enforcement across SOA systems. It enables organizations to create reusable policies for their runtime environments and abstract these policies from the application code. AmberPoint exchanges policy directives with an SOA governance framework. Architects can define approved policies and make them available to their SOA developers. Developers can select the policies they need to implement and attach them to their services on the fly, without any additional coding effort. AmberPoint is able to delegate policies to its own enforcement points as well as third-party SOA intermediaries such as appliances and application servers.

By abstracting policies and automating policy provisioning, AmberPoint ensures that the runtime reality matches the governance intent.

Integration with Repositories and Registries

An organization must continuously evolve its best practices as it gains experience with SOA. However, this evolution requires all parties involved to have insight into the operational characteristics of the SOA system.

AmberPoint enriches governance repositories and registries with vital runtime data such as throughput, availability, response times, faults, service level agreement violations and exceptions across a choice of intervals (last day, last week, last month, etc.).

This enables developers and architects to understand service characteristics relative to the intended performance of the system. It also enables better decision-making when selecting services for new composite applications.

Without a closed-loop system in place, SOA governance may fail to deliver value.