Tony Rogers

A Survey of Policy-Based Management Approaches for Service Oriented Systems

Policy based management in service oriented architecture (SOA) allows organizations to apply rules and regulations on their business processes. Policy has long been employed in the management of traditional distributed systems and many policy frameworks have been proposed. However, SOA differs in several aspects to traditional systems thus there is a unique set of requirements for an effective SOA policy system. In this paper, we evaluate five popular policy frameworks which are IETF, Ponder, KAoS, Rei and WS-policy against a number of general and SOA-specific criteria to identify what features of these existing systems can be adopted for SOA and what are not. We then, based on their feature sets, discuss the applicability of the frameworks for SOA management.

Policy-based service registration and discovery

The WS-Policy framework has been introduced to allow policy to be expressed and associated with Web Services thereby enabling organizations to manage the quality of their services. How the specified polices are kept consistent with the organizations regulations, and how to match service and client policies requirements for effective service discovery, are issues yet to be addressed. In this paper, we present a new approach that allows for the automatic verification and matching of policies, using a service registry that serves as a policy storage and management facility, a policy checkpoint during service publication and as a policy matchmaker during service discovery. We extend WS-Policy with a policy conformance operator for policy verification and use WS-Policy Intersection for policy matching. We develop a policy information model and policy processing logics for the registry. An implementation of a policy-enabled service registry is also introduced.