ESB Governance

Every large company will have more than one Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).  This simple prediction forms the core thesis behind the concept of ESB Federation.

Software construction and integration continues to be a labor intensive task. As the state of computer science progresses, we are continually finding new tools and techniques to reduce the efforts and increase the return.
The rise of a ubiquitous service oriented computing theme has brought new opportunity for productivity and new challenges for architects and designers.

The problems and solutions enterprises face as they roll-out SOA and Web services, and in many cases ESB instances can be organized into a few overarching groups:

  • Working with services units (focus on loose coupling)
  • Working with networks (focus on resource virtualization)
  • Networking services together (focus on agile composition)
  • Doing 1-3 economically (focus on scalability across several dimensions)
  • Enabling new offerings based on the new technology (focus on the future)

The rapid adoption of SOA and the need for supporting infrastructure has driven the emergency of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).  Given the nature of the ESB, and the fact that all major enterprise software companies offer an ESB, it is clear that every large enterprise will have multiple ESBs deployed.
As enterprises deploy multiple ESB instances, they will need to provide an infrastructure to manage, secure, mediate, and govern these instances. 

The capabilities required in an ESB Governance solution are delivered through standards-based SOA infrastructure. 

These capabilities include:

  • Security – ensuring the privacy, authenticity, authorization, non-repudiation, and auditing of all messages moving within and between ESB instances and other service-oriented applications. This also includes de-coupling (or operationalization) of the security management model from the application programming model.
  • Mediation – many applications and ESB instances will use and support different standards protocols and technologies along with different invocation, synchronicity, reliability, and security models. An ESB Federation solution provides policy-based mediation between the various synchronicity, reliability, programming and security models, standards and technologies, messaging styles and standards, to ensure seamless interoperability.
  • Management – as ESB instances proliferate, enterprises will need a holistic view of the transactions that traverse their platforms and applications.  An ESB Federation solution provides monitoring, management, SLA and alert reporting capabilities for all managed platforms including ESB instances.
  • Governance – the ESB Federation solution provides a consistent policy definition, implementation, administration, management and enforcement mechanism for all SOA-enabled platforms and ESB instances within the enterprise.  It ensure that all services implement and enforce the same set of policies, and can comply with the policies that will be enforced downstream.