What is SOA governance? What are its functions?

What is SOA governance? What are its functions?

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance is a concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in an SOA

Some key activities that are often mentioned as being part of SOA governance are:
- Managing the portfolio of services: This includes planning development of new services and updating current services.
- Managing the service lifecycle: This is meant to ensure that updates of services do not disturb current services to the consumers.
- Using policies to restrict behavior: Consistency of services can be ensured by having the rules applied to all the created services.
- Monitoring performance of services: The consequences of service downtime or underperformance can be severe because of service composition. Therefore action can be taken instantly when a problem occurs by monitoring service performance and availability.