AmberPoint improves SOA policy execution

The next release of the AmberPoint SOA Management System decouples policy enforcement from the agents that have executed these policies, letting third-party systems such as enterprise service buses execute policies.

This approach can improve performance and reliability, AmberPoint said.

Version 5.1 of AmberPoint’s Web services and SOA management platform, being announced Monday, will feature this revision, which the company describes as agentless SOA runtime governance. The architectural change allows users to delegate policy execution to their own devices or software. Agents still can be used where the agentless scenario is not applicable, such as where it is precluded by limitations of a platform.

Also being unveiled as part of the Version 5.1 moniker and featuring the agentless technology is AmberPoint SOA Validation System, for validating SOA performance and functionality.

“What’s happening or is starting to happen is that more and more of the infrastructure, of the SOA infrastructure, has the ability to do some of the work directly,” said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing. With the new approach, users can administer an SOA without having to set up each piece individually to function with AmberPoint.

For starters, AmberPoint is revealing that the F5 Networks Big-IP device for load balancing of IP addresses and the Iona Artix ESB can take advantage of the new architecture. Other products with this capability will be announced in the future, in the appliance, application server, and ESB categories.

“You really want to optimize the use of all [of] this infrastructure,” such as an ESB, appliance or a security gateway purchased for individual strengths, Horst said.

“From the end-user standpoint, it’s easier to set up and administer and you still get the optimum use of the infrastructure purchased,” he said.

F5 sees advantages in the new integration between its product and AmberPoint.

“The benefit is many of our customers are deploying and designing SOA infrastructure today,” said Jeff Browning, F5 director of product management. “What’s exciting about what AmberPoint is doing is by integrating the SOA execution and runtime management with the underlying hardware and network infrastructure required for enterprise-grade applications, now the application and the Web services tier is going to be able to work in concert with the underlying network and server infrastructure.”

Version 5.1 of AmberPoint’s platform ships this quarter. It is priced at $35,000 per CPU.