Infrastructure-based Mediation for Enforcement of Policies in Composed and Federated Applications

By design, a federated “system of systems” application offers limited control over the components and services that it is built upon. However, as the application evolves, there will be changes required to the components and services that comprise the application. As these services are likely to support multiple federated applications, not all will evolve in the same manner. It is essential to limit the scope of change resulting from this application coupling. We see the separation of “policy enforcement” from core application logic as a mechanism to better decouple federated applications. Such separation can allow policy to evolve without impacting other applications or the core services, and allow the components to evolve and still be subject to the same policy.