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.