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An Open Policy Framework for Cross-vendor Integrated Governance

Governance of web services from a common policy definition store and consistent runtime behavior is often difficult to achieve. The various implementations of ERPs and other application server stacks which are common in enterprises put in place differing vendor products. Each vendor product handles the definition of policy through service registries or application configuration consoles with their own specific definition. This makes it difficult for various instances of services which become responsible for enforcing those policies and data to do so consistently on messages which pass around the Enterprise and Extended Enterprise.

The concept of separating the centralized service registry and policy management system and enforcement runtime has been well-established. In reality most technology stacks implement a hard coupling between the policy definition and the runtime execution environment. In the case where the separation is somewhat clear in the implementation, even popular service registries work best with the same vendor’s intermediary or application server. In some cases the only possibility to get policy definition deployed into runtime is to use a single vendor approach. However, single sourcing the policy design and governance management, and the enforcement runtime is often difficult to achieve due to business environment, acquisition, or supplier relationships.

Unfortunately standards are still not mature enough to provide an answer. What is needed is an open, pluggable platform, and policy integration framework that allows an organization to bridge different vendor registries with various service implementations. This paper discusses the architecture and an implementation in Intel’s SOA Expressway which makes this type of open, and integrated governance possible.