Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

146 Chapter 8 Bringing Governance to the Clouds
the world of SOA , simply put, governance means designing, building, testing,
and implementing policies for services and monitoring their use.
Governance as related to services, or service governance, is most applicable
to the use of cloud computing, since we are basically defining our architecture
as a set of services that are relocatable between on-premise and cloud
computing-based systems. SOA is the approach here, and SOA or service
governance is the approach and the technology we leverage to manage the
services within the enterprise and cloud.
Policies in the context of SOA and cloud computing are declarative electronic
rules about what can be done to a service and by whom:
Who can access the service.
What they can do to the service.
How changes to the service affect other services.
How changes to the service affect applications.
How governance works with security.
How governance links into service testing.
How governance works with service discovery.
How governance works with service delivery.
How to set and maintain appropriate service levels.
How to manage errors and exceptions.
How to enable online upgrades and versioning.
How to perform service validation.
How to perform auditing and logging.
This is a complete approach and system to make sure the deployed services
do what they should do and are monitored and controlled from a single
centralized utility: service governance. Service governance is the concept, the
approach, and the technology. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of
service governance, suggest an approach toward service governance (see Figure
8.1), and provide an understanding of service governance technology.
In Chapter 6, “Working from Your Services to the Clouds,” we learned
the basics of SOA governance, including the two larger categories, runtime
and design time.
Design time service governance typically provides an integrated registry/
repository that attempts to manage a service from its design to its deployment
but typically not during runtime execution of the services, albeit some
do. We do not focus on design time in this chapter or in the book, but we focus
on how to design services.