SOA Management Systems

The goal of this post is to introduce SOA Management Systems and some of their capabilities.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is now-a-days an important buzz word for most of the moderately big organizations. While most of the organizations are trying to achieve it through "Web Services" there can be other implementations as well. With the increasing popularity of SOA and its inception via Web Services, web service management or SOA Management is a key step for success.


There are many products in the industry which are providing such solutions, Amberpoint, Progress Actional, Tibco ActiveMatrix, Oracle ClearApp, etc. With the help of these tools one can separate the security concerns to an extent and can focus primarily on deliverables (developing code for business logic rather than for security). Some of the other features are logging, security (authorization, authentication, SAML, etc), transaction control/management, service level agreement (SLA) based policies and various custom policies.


Based on the deployment architecture, application/web servers used and hardware/software some of the tools can provide visibility inside the web services by instrumenting the class loaders. While it is totally based on the requirements whether to go for this additional visibility or not, going for this will create lot of information which may cause adverse performance issues.


Most of the products enforce policies based on Proxy mechanism. While proxies gives power also comes with the tightly coupling architecture with them.


In summary there are many SOA Management Systems out there in the market and most of them separate the concerns for logging, security, and policies there by helping in delivarables and return on investment (ROI).


Note: Amberpoint, Progress Actional, Tibco ActiveMatrix, Oracle ClearApp are registered trademarks of respective companies.