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Organizations of all size recognize the need for application integration governance

When it comes to application integration, governance may not be the first technology that comes to mind. Still, it’s an important part of the integration process, and governance technologies are seeing wider user as service-oriented architecture and cloud computing adoption grows.

“A couple of years ago only very large organizations were pushing governance, and it was very much from a top down approach,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of enterprise service bus and middleware provider WSO2. “We’re beginning to now see everybody wanting an answer.”

WSO2 released a new version of its governance registry last week. Fremantle said that over 90% of users of the WSO2 ESB use a governance registry alongside it.

“What you want to do well with governance is make sure people go through the right review process before they publish a service to the ESB,” said Fremantle. “Typically you want to have a flow from design to development to unit test and system test then onto production.

“To move it from one thing to another you want to have a checklist,” said Fremantle. “Are [developers] reusing schema, or using new schema that has the same data but a different format? Did they go through the review process? Have they got the right security policy on this service?”

Rise of public APIs driving governance and ESB adoption

Fremantle said the recent push towards using public application programming interfaces [APIs] for integration is not much different from the rise of SOA and ESBs. “An API is just a service,” said Fremantle. “The whole drive to APIs is having a big impact on this space.”