SOA governance vs. API governance

[msebai]

We already have well established SOA practice and about to launch our API program. In terms of governance, how do we align development, release, accountability etc. Do they overlap or do we manage them independently?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

This is really going to depend on your SOA governance standards. Classic SOA governance has become problematic to the success of APIs because it hasn't kept up with the types of applications and use cases being addressed by the service architecture. A great example of this is the failure of "mobile SOA", where the reusability principles have often been at odds with the reality of service consumption on a constrained device on a slow network. Many SOA practices forbid application-specific API services and hence don't allow for the creation of APIs necessary to support good mobile experiences. Netflix has proven that "experience APIs" are different than classic SOA services and API governance needs to support these types of APIs.