Software vendors are now creating SOA runtime products that oversee a network of services. The general direction of that work is to allow a programmer, business analyst, or network coordinator to change product-configuration settings that affect (for example) the following issues:
how security is handled
which of several identical services at different locations is accessed by a requester
whether a set of services is invoked in response to a requester's invocation of a single service
what log information is collected
An SOA runtime product might allow the configuration of intermediaries, which are processing centers that do administrative or technical tasks during the transmission of data between a requester and a service. An intermediary might reroute messages in response to network traffic or business priorities; might reformat messages because the requester uses a transport protocol different from the one used by the service; or might provide security - for example, by authenticating requesters or by shielding the service from a flood of messages.
In the future, a subset of runtime products will incorporate guidelines from Service Component Architecture, an emerging open standard that permits flexibility at development, configuration, and run time.