WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Completes the SOA Lifecycle
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository facilitates storing, accessing and managing service information, called service metadata, so that you can easily select, invoke, govern and reuse your services. The repository serves as a central location in which you can advertise and find information about any service deployed in or used by your organization. Furthermore, it is the enabling structure that allows you to understand the capabilities and requirements of the services as well as the crucial issues governing them including policies defining who can see, change, create or use a specific service.

The publish and find capabilities of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository give users greater visibility and easier access to existing services. Its service discovery engine can find and keep track of deployed services within your SOA. It also features an advanced query mechanism to search and find the services that best fit the requirements of a given process. You can search for a service or asset using tags, document types, or other types of classifications.

You can upload services to and download services from the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository and perform numerous types of searches across both tools. Rational Asset Manager enables new or modified services to be published to the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Once a service asset is published, the repositories are synchronized enabling Rational Asset Manager software to support advanced search and retrieval capabilities.

The enrich capability enables dynamic and efficient access to services information by both runtime applications and processes that facilitate better connectivity and efficiency. With an enterprise service bus (ESB), WebSphere Service Registry and Repository increases runtime flexibility of applications and processes by providing dynamic selection of services (for example, Web services) based on service metadata stored in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, making intelligent decisions to route messages.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository's management capability works with service metadata, as well as service interactions, dependencies and redundancies. It allows services to be classified as per your business objectives and attach policies for service usage. It can capture information about service health and performance from monitoring tools and associate with it with the service, thereby maintaining an authoritative source of all service metadata.

The govern capability of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository plays an enabler role for SOA governance by supporting:

Access control
You can control the visibility and access to service metadata for sharing and reuse by using role-based access.

Service classification
You can classify services and related metadata into groups that are meaningful in the domain of your organization and that align with your business needs.

Service lifecycle
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository supports tracking of service metadata as it makes its way through its governed lifecycle, including approvals, deprecation and retirement in development, testing, staging and production environments. You can easily implement best practices for service lifecycle management with the ability to promote services and associated metadata based on lifecycle validations.

Impact analysis
By maintaining relationships, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has extensive support for analyzing the impact of service introduction, deletion or alteration. Using graphical views, you can determine the impact of making changes to services in your SOA environment.

Policy support
You can publish policies that apply to services stored in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, including policy specifications that are compliant with the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy). These policies are enforced by runtime products, such as an ESB, and help you institute best practices in your SOA deployment.

Governance profile
To help you get started easily and quickly, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides a well-defined service model that includes templates, associated lifecycles, governance policies with a generic validator, a classification system, roles and perspectives. You can customize the model to suit your business needs.

SOA governance is arguably the most critical component of any SOA implementation. Without it, your SOA services are just a jumbled collection of unusable assets. Together Rational Asset Manager and the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository software deliver a full-service lifecycle governance solution that spans both development and deployment services—turning all your SOA assets into easy-to-find and manage reusable services.

More Resources

• Try IBM Rational Asset Manager Online!



• Rational Asset Manager eKit



• Webcast: Innovate Don't Duplicate! Asset Reuse Strategies for Success



• IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Overview



• SOA Quality Management—A Critical Aspect of Service Lifecycle Management



• Hello World: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository



• SOA and Web Services Testing Kit



• Webcast: Succeed with Asset-based Development—Introducing Rational Asset Manager



• Whitepaper: A Day in the Life of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository in the SOA Lifecycle