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

158 Chapter 8 Bringing Governance to the Clouds
Governance Technology
As you may recall from Chapter 6, runtime service governance technology
provides the platform for policy execution and thus the process of enforcing
and implementing those policies at service runtime, but it may do other
things as well.
Runtime service governance technology comes in many flavors due to
the number of vendors in that space and how it is defined by each vendor.
There are no de facto standards as to what runtime service governance needs
to be, but certain patterns are emerging. Runtime service governance typically
includes
Service discovery
Service delivery
Service security
Setting and maintaining appropriate service levels
Managing errors and exceptions
Enabling online upgrades and versioning
Service validation
Auditing and logging
Service discovery is the process of finding, analyzing, and detailing an existing
service and the defining a policy to govern that service. The great thing
about this feature is that you simply enter the location of the service (URL),
and the runtime service governance technology does the rest, including entering
aspects of the service into the repository (discussed shortly).
Service delivery is the process of moving services from development to
execution or production, either on-premise or into the clouds.
Service security encompasses the functions around protection of the
managed services and enforcement of the policies.
Setting and maintaining appropriate service levels refers to making sure
that all of the services execute per the service agreements and preset levels.
This is especially important in an architecture that leverages cloud computing
because those services may come with service-level agreements that must
be managed too.
Managing errors and exceptions is a feature whereby any errors and exceptions
that occur are captured, analyzed, and perhaps recovered from automatically.
Typically, this means that those who implement the policies
define how errors and exceptions should be managed for a specific service or