(this article is a live blog: it is a work in progress – as I am currently reading this book – and this article will be updated in the next few days and weeks; when completed, the marker Live Blog will be removed)
- Title: Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation
- By: Luis Augusto Weir, Andrew Bell
- Publisher: Packt
- Released: September 2013
- Pages: 440
- ISBN : 1849689083
- ISBN 13 : 9781849689083
The title of this book is clear: the term SOA Governance is fairly well known. Oracle SOA Governance 11g is a product suite from Oracle, released in February 2010:
“Oracle SOA Governance 11g consisting of Oracle Enterprise Repository, Oracle Service Registry, SOA Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Web Services Manager. Oracle SOA Governance 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, enables organizations to manage their heterogeneous software project artifacts under a unified governance umbrella. Fully integrated with Oracle SOA Suite 11g, the new release [of SOA Governance 11g] helps organizations simplify governance of software development projects. Oracle SOA Governance 11g is fully integrated with Oracle AmberPoint, a leader in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Management. The new solution provides organizations more continuity of closed-loop governance processes across both Oracle and third party applications. Oracle SOA Governance 11g supports Oracle Applications including Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel along with Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). These integrations provide organizations with unprecedented level of automation in the delivery and management of service-based applications.”
Finally the word implementation in the title indicates that the book describes the practical use of this product [to realize SOA Governance]. Which is much more useful than a theoretical overview of what the product entails.
The relevance of this book is thereby well established: implementing SOA (service oriented architecture) using Oracle’s Service Bus and SCA Composite engine (BPEL, Mediator, Business Rule, Technology Adapters etc.) cannot be complete without having some form of governance on the SOA related artifacts. Agility – the ultimate prize – through reuse and encapsulated code changes as well as controlled life cycles can only become a reality if an organization has a firm grip on the combination of discipline, processes, quality assurance and supporting tooling that together is labeled governance. Many organizations are very much struggling with this topic – so the book is eagerly awaited.
I hope that the book will be useful for organizations that use Oracle SOA technology, but not necessarily [all of] the Oracle SOA Governance Suite 11g. Many companies that I visit do not use all of the suite – for example the Service Registry is a product I have not found anywhere actually being used. In this article, I describe my personal experiences and findings with reading this book. These may give you some idea if this book will be valuable for you.
The main objectives for a reader of this book are stated as follows:
- Understand SOA governance including its key concepts, goals, and objectives, and how to implement these using the Oracle SOA Governance Suite
- Execute an SOA maturity assessment in order to capture the SOA governance challenges specific to your organization
- Implement Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and Oracle Service Registry (OSR) to address your organization’s SOA governance design-time and runtime requirements
The first chapter in the book explains about SOA Governance. What are the objectives? What should broadly be done to meet those objectives? SOA Governance is positioned as an interaction between what, who and how – or policies, decision makers and processes. SOA Governance is about dealing with challenges that frustrate organizations in achieving the benefits from SOA (such as flexibility and reuse). Crucial in SOA Governance as described in this chapter is the notion of an Asset. An asset is an electronic (IT related) artifact that adds value to the business. This includes API descriptions, contracts, designs and even source code. SOA Governance is focused on managing the assets through their lifecycle – ensuring that these assets are available to all who need them – with the appropriate access privileges.
The chapter introduces the SOA Governance Framework and discusses SOA Maturity Assessment according to the Oracle SOA Maturity Model (see for example http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/oracle-wp-soa-maturity-model-176717.pdf ). 
From the assessment of an organization’s maturity with regards to SOA, a roadmap can be painted to guide that organization to a higher level by strengthening each of a series of domains or areas.
Based heavily on Oracle’s documentation in this area, the chapter lists a number of design time governance framework artifacts that an organization should have in place in order to achieve higher maturity level. The list includes artifacts like SOA architecture principles, logical reference architecture, SOA development standards and deployment standards. Similarly a list is provided with runtime artifacts that should be in place.
With more concrete focus on services, the book states: for a service, the following assets are delivered: functional contract, technical contract, detail design, service versioning (which is not version control of source code, but versioning at the contract level), terms of services. Design time SOA governance at the very least consists of managing these assets.
Run time SOA governance is defined as the combination of processes, tools and people needed to support the deployment and testing,production support of a SOA implementation project.
The book does not discuss agile software development approaches, nor does it really stray beyond projects to the maintenance phase of applications – or rather: functional, end-to-end processes that leverage a number of assets from the services landscape. The book sticks to what Oracle Enterprise Repository does, it seems, and that product largely predates the agile revolution.
The SOA Design Authority is introduced as an important body, that encompasses all capability domains, meets at least bi-weekly to cover topics such as SOA pipeline, review and approval of designs and definition of roadmaps. The SOA Design Authority is composed of people who are or represent business architect, SOA Support specialists, configuration manager, SOA Architect, Solution Architect and Enterprise Architect.
On the whole, I like this chapter – it lays a good foundation and is relatively technology and vendor free. It is about SOA Governance, not about Oracle. Many of the procedures introduced in this chapter are hopefully discussed in concrete detail in the chapters that follow.
[end of edit on 18th November]
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[… Writing on this article is still in progress….. Come Back for Updates to this article ….]
Resources
Home page of book on Packt web site: http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-governance-11g-implementation/book
Oracle press release announcing Oracle SOA Governance (February 2010).
