A Practical Example

Using a governance platform, software developers and IT managers can see management policies prescribing developers to use a particular service or set of services in the application. The governance platform shows developers and IT managers service dependencies allowing them to determine a service's reliability and build redundancy into the service to handle instances when an upstream service goes down. Software developers can do this today, without SOA or governance platforms. For example, one developer may tell another about a great US Postal Zip code look-up service for use in a product registration Web page enabling users to type in their zip code and have the page automatically fill in the city and state fields. The same developer may warn he noticed the service throws errors when used on the weekends. This developer-to-developer exchange conveys the following knowledge:

The existence and location of the Zipcode lookup service

The service was not reliable on the weekends but worked fine on weekdays

The service functioned according to its published schema

In an ideal world, the SOA governance platform conveys the same knowledge. For instance, a search shows a list of services and their metadata, including their up / down status.

Integration with Appvance run-time provides knowledge about services, reliability, and quality. In an SOA environment, Appvance run-time drives a composite application using its native protocols to determine its functionality, scalability, performance, and up-time. Appvance is popular with software developers because it turns their existing unit and functional tests into SOA function, scalability, performance, and service monitor tests automatically. Additionally, Appvance is a distributed test automation platform where tests run on remote TestNodes on multiple networks and machines. IT managers, software developers, and architects like Appvance IQ because its’ tests provide knowledge feeds to governance tools, like:

Up-Time Feed to determine Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance

Functioning Feed to discover service regression bugs

Reliability Feed to quantify service reliability over time