Oracle OpenWorld: Using Oracle Web Services Manager to Manage Security

Full disclosure: I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

I’m having to recreate this post thanks to a bug in WordPress for the iPhone which managed to eat a couple posts, so my apologies for it being a bit shorter than hoped, since I had to recall what I was typing live.

In this talk, Vikas Jain gave an overview of Oracle Web Services Manager, and Josh Bregman (I think) gave a demo of integration between Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) and Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). For most of his portion, Vikas went over the architecture behind WSM. It hasn’t changed too dramatically since I first saw it back as Confluent years ago, and that’s a good thing, since it had proper separation between policy enforcement and policy management. One thing I didn’t know, which is a good thing, is that the WSM enforcement point is now an embedded agent within WebLogic Server. That is, it comes with WebLogic server, there’s no separate install for it. This is a very important point, because if you need to do end-to-end identity propagation, you’ll need some kind of agent or native support for your identity formats on every node in the call chain. They did mention E2E identity propagation on a slide, but they didn’t go into any depth on it.

From a feature standpoint, OWSM has all of the necessary WS-* features necessary, including WS-Policy, WS-Security, SAML support, and WS-ReliableMessaging to name a few.

One thing I was disappointed with is when they presented a slide on integrations with the rest of the fusion middleware, Oracle Service Bus was not shown. SOA and WebLogic was a line item, and since OSB runs on WebLogic, it could be inferred that there’s a relationship, but what I wanted to know about was the significant functionality overlap between OSB and OWSM. I did get to ask about this, and the first answer was that they felt there wasn’t a lot of overlap, and frankly, I don’t agree with that in the slightest. On the plus side, however, they did say that in a future release of Oracle Service Bus, the security features of OSB will be fully provided by the OWSM agent, and not by the underlying WebLogic (non-OWSM) capabilities as is currently done. If this is the case, then they are working to eliminate the functional overlap, however, there’s a long way to go. Oracle Service Bus is a policy enforcement point, just as Oracle Web Service Manager agents are. OWSM can do more than just security, just as OSB can. Hopefully, this will be resolved in the future, and customers will not have to choose between two products from the same vendor to attack the same problem of enforcing service contract policies through a service intermediary.

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