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The following article refers to an outdated product. Anypoint Service Registry has been rolled up into a new product called API Manager, part of Anypoint Platform for APIs. Please visit those pages for the latest information. 

Service registry to optimize SOA governance

Technology is changing faster than ever. The emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile devices, and big data has driven an exponential increase in the number of services and applications a businesses houses in its ecosystem. These services interoperate to create connectivity across the enterprise. In order to maximize the benefits of these services, businesses require not only a robust Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but also efficient SOA Governance. SOA Governance enables organizations to streamline critical business processes, enforce policies, manage contracts, monitor performance, and ultimately deliver on the promise of a robust SOA.

SOA presents challenges

Challenges arise when creating an interconnected SOA. A lack of visibility and governance leaves room for service proliferation and duplication as well as regulatory compliance issues. Moreover, as businesses change and evolve, a Service Oriented Architecture that adapts accordingly is a must. As businesses undergo change, including mergers and acquisitions, the number of platforms, consumers, services, and exposed APIs can increase rapidly. SOA Governance is needed to provide full visibility into existing assets; without it, businesses lack the tools to govern and manage assets consistently. Governing related services, policies, and contracts in a complex SOA becomes difficult. Additionally, enforcing policies and contracts as well as ensuring quality of services can be a struggle for businesses.

Without Application Service Governance in place managing policies, contracts, services, SLAs, internally or externally is challenging. Moreover, without a future-proof SOA strategy, adapting to changing businesses needs is difficult. In order to deliver the greatest value to businesses, Service Oriented Architecture needs standards.

 

The Anypoint™ service registry solution

Built for the New Enterprise, Anypoint Service Registry is an SOA Governance platform that ensures compliance with internal standards and best practices as well as regulatory mandates. Moreover, Anypoint Service Registry makes it easy to manage and monitor services, keeping you apprised of the performance and usage patterns of all of your services, so you can focus on innovation and optimization, not governance.  

Advantages of Anypoint service registry

The SOA Governance platform offers numerous advantages to businesses, including the ability to reuse services. With Anypoint Service Registry, the issue of service proliferation is alleviated by increasing visibility and promoting reuse of services. Additionally, location transparency offers flexibility and agility to organizations, shielding consumers from change. Businesses can alter services and make changes without impacting consumers. Moreover, Anypoint Service Registry defines and enforces contracts while ensuring adherence to SLAs. Anypoint Service Registry makes it easy to manage services from end-to-end, providing control to reduce risk and downtime.

Anypoint Service Registry seamlessly interoperates with Mule ESB and CloudHub to deliver numerous benefits:

  • Low TCO: Compared to other registry solutions, Anypoint Service Registry has a lower overall total cost of ownership. Because the registry is a cloud-based solution, there is no infrastructure to deploy. Moreover, new governance features can easily be added and utilized without extensive upgrade costs.
  • Flexibility and agility: Anypoint Service Registry interoperates seamlessly with Mule ESB, CloudHub, and Anypoint Studio, providing users with a single, easy-to-use design environment for creating, deploying, and managing SOA initiatives and integration applications across on-premises and cloud deployments. Anypoint Studio gives businesses the flexibility to develop once and deploy on either Mule ESB or CloudHub.
  • Future-proof and secure: While SOA can deliver significant value to your internal operations, it is also the gateway to exposing services externally to partners and customers. In this regard, SOA and API management are like two sides of the same coin and Anypoint Service Registry is closely integrated with Anypoint API Manager, which makes API management (sometimes referred to as external services management) effortless. What’s more, this offering, along with Anypoint Service Registry, provides the high-availability and security that organizations have come to expect from MuleSoft. With 100% uptime and bullet-proof protection, businesses can rest assured knowing their integrations ecosystems are secured.

Anypoint service registry offers valuable features

Packaged within Anypoint Service Registry is a set of valuable features to streamline SOA governance with Mule ESB or CloudHub:

  • Service repository: Store crucial information regarding services and applications in a central repository to prevent duplication and promote reuse. Service Repository makes it easy to promote reuse by making it easy to discover and access the right services for a task.
  • Service analytics: View real-time data about your services in a single interface. Service Analytics also makes it effortless to monitor availability, uptime, response time, traffic, utilization, and the number of consumers for each service.
  • Policy manager: Create, edit, and enforce policies without downtime to services.
  • Contract manager: Define and enforce contracts between providers and consumers. Contract Manager also allows consumers and service providers to interact to negotiate terms, request access, specify service levels.
  • Service virtualizer: Service Virtualizer provides location transparency via dynamic endpoint lookup, allowing for seamless location changes without service interruption. Moreover, dynamic lookup makes its easy to lookup services based on business context.

Anypoint Service Registry makes it easy to manage and monitor services and  enforce standards, policies and contracts. With a robust SOA governance solution, organizations can focus on driving business forward instead of worrying about policies and contracts.

Learn more about Anypoint Service Registry or contact an expert today to get started.  Also, take a look at our “SOA Governance Best Practices” webinar below to learn more about SOA architecture best practices and governance challenges.