Overview of Policies
A policy adds run-time governance capabilities to a virtual service or a Connector Virtual Service. A policy is a sequence of actions that are carried out by CloudStreams when a consumer requests a particular service through CloudStreams.
The actions in a policy perform activities such as identifying/authenticating consumers, validating digital signatures and capturing performance measurements. An action is a single task that is included in a policy and is evaluated by CloudStreams at run time. Actions have one or more parameters, which you configure when you insert the actions into a policy. For example, an action that identifies consumers specifies one or more identifiers to identify the consumers who are trying to access the services.
CloudStreams provides built-in action templates. A built-in action template is a definition of an action that can be used in a policy. An action template specifies the set of parameters associated with a particular policy action. You can use these action templates to create actions for policies.
When you create a policy, you:
1. Specify the service(s) to which the policy should apply. A policy can apply to one or more virtual services or one or more Connector Virtual Services, but not to both types of services.
2. Add the desired actions to the policy, and configure their parameters.
3. Activate the policy when you are ready to put it into effect. When you deploy the virtual services or Connector Virtual Services to which the policy is applied, the policy will also be deployed.
Following is a summary of the kinds of actions you can include in policies for virtual services and Connector Virtual Services. Detailed descriptions of the actions appear later, in
The Policy Actions.