SCI-Flex Assists SOA Governance

SOA governance is related to any activity that is used as means of exercising control over an SOA infrastructure. This concept is based on IT governance which is based on corporate governance. A more detailed explanation is available here. SOA governance thus incorporate two main workflows, imposing policies and monitoring activities.

SCI-Flex which integrates Complex Event Processing capabilities to SOA is an ideal fit for workflows related to monitoring activities. Business Activity Monitoring can easily be done using SCI-Flex which also can be configured as an intemediatory in making sure that certain policies are enforced. SCI-Flex also makes it possible to validate the presence of SOA policies given that a proper event generation mechanism is in place.

SCI-Flex however does only provide the infrastructure for Business Activity Monitoring, and thus a suitable protocol is required. This can be one of many options such as WS-Eventing, XMPP pub/sub, or even JMS. Therefore, what SCI-Flex provides is immense:

• Service lifecycle management
• Service performance analysis
• Service coordination monitoring
• Business process monitoring
• Notification services
• Managed policy enforcement

Thus, SCI-Flex becomes an ideal entity that serves the purpose of a complete Event Management System in a typical SOA Governance Application.

Registry Integration of SCI-Flex mediator

The SCI-Flex mediator supports static configuration of XML as well as AXIOM message reception and mediation through Esper CEP system as of today. Obviously, the mediator requires some bits of configuration that it needs in order to make proper use of Esper and the routing of messages through Synapse. Classically, the mediator is backed with a configuration XML object which is embedded in the Synapse configuration (synapse.xml) used by the Synapse ESB. According to how Synapse is implemented, the configuration is statically loaded and the ESB continues to use the same bits of information through out an active lifetime.

By analyzing the nature of the configuration information provided to the Synapse-Esper mediator, we discovered that whilst certain portions of the configuration seems static and used over and over, certain portions need not necessarily be so. Thus, it was obviously needed to have some way that one could dynamically configure the mediator according to his/her requirement.

Synapse facilitates the option of dynamically configuring parameters of the ESB by the use of a remote back-end Registry. The WSO2ESB uses this model of Synapse and provides two models of back-end Registries, the ESB Registry and the WSO2 Registry (using the WSO2 Registry project).

We have made it possible for a user of SCI-Flex to be able to dynamically configure the endpoint to which the responses should be delivered as well as, provide the EPL queries through either of the back-end Registries implemented by the WSO2 ESB.

More information on how to use the SCI-Flex interface to store EPL queries, and endpoints on a back-end Registry will be added shortly.