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

Creating the Governance Model 157
What about Governance in the Cloud
The idea of governance is to provide command, control, discovery, and monitoring
as well as design and development support for services that make up
your architecture, including on-premise and cloud-based systems. Most people
get that, but in some cases they do not want to get that. Perhaps there is a
larger opportunity here for both the cloud providers and the end users.
What is so limiting about governance is that you are given an empty registry/repository
and asked to fill it up with information about services that you
create or, in most cases, expose. From there, it is a constant struggle to keep
that repository up to date and to make sure the architecture, cloud and onpremise,
is governed properly. We have been here before with metadata repositories
that do not seem to get the maintenance they need. Perhaps we are
doomed to make the same mistake with cloud governance unless we come up
with something clever.
We have dealt with the notion of a shared registry/repository, delivered as
a service, for some time now. Instead of leveraging a local repository that just
tracks services within your enterprises, you link to a shared repository that
already contains thousands of services from thousands of providers, with
design and governance information, and it is just a matter of picking what you
need and then filling in the gaps with your own services.
This repository would provide not only Web Services Description Language
(WSDL) but a complete design-time and runtime governance system
delivered out of the cloud, perhaps linked with a local slave repository within
your firewall. The core notion would be to provide access and control for both
public services, which you and others can leverage, and private services that
only your enterprise can see. That would provide a complete governance solution,
design-time and runtime, for all services.
Also, since this is a cloud thing, we need to provide “new value.” The core
value that I see, beyond the use of hosted services you do not develop or maintain,
is that design patterns are already defined for you around specific categories
of services, and prebuilt policies exist around the operation of those
services. These policies, as well as services, are shared: As the services are
revised, so are the design artifacts and the policies, both shared and private. In
short, you are taking advantage of the community aspect of SOA governance
delivered as a service to do most of the work for you—100,000 heads are better
than one.