Runtime SOA Governance

I've recently been asked to define Runtime SOA Governance in the glossary of a project, and having looked high and low, have come to the conclusion that there is no widely accepted definition of the term, which is somewhat surprising given the number of product vendors who mention the term. Despite the risks to my personal safety of doing so, I have come up with my own, which I am only vaguely happy with: Runtime SOA Governance provides a mechanism allowing information about the operation of a running SOA environment to be fed back into an organisation’s SOA governance function. The information gathered may include:

• How often each service is invoked.
• Which services each service invokes.
• Whether services are meeting their service level agreements in terms of availability, reliability and performance.

This information helps to support investment and change decisions by giving the governance function a better understanding of the runtime behaviour of the services. If you have a better definition, do let me know...

Apprentice Jedi seen in Norwich

A friend (thanks John) just sent me a link to a news story about an 11 year old boy who defended his mother from attack by an unknown assailant with - wait for it - a light sabre. Maybe it's time to upgrade my car to a Millennium Falcon; keeping up with the jones has never been so expensive...