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

Governance Technology 159
group of services. The objective is to recover from most errors and exceptions
without human intervention, if possible.
Enabling online upgrades and versioning is the process of placing new services
and/or policies into service, controlling the process around the upgrades
made to services and/or policies, and controlling how services and/or
policies are versioned. This is done by allowing the repository to track all services
and policies under management, including the complete history of
services and policies that have been created, tested, and deployed in either
the on-premise or cloud computing–based systems.
As developers build new versions of services, or as policy designers design
and build new policies, a mechanism must be in place to insure that updating
services and policies will not break the existing system or systems. Runtime service
governance is able to track any upgrades that are made, insuring that the
applications, processes, and other services leveraging those services are made
aware of the change; that alterations are made; and that testing is completed.
Moreover, if issues are discovered, there should be a mechanism to return
to the previous version of the service and/or policy. Besides the use of
policies to control access to services, this is one of the most important functions
of runtime governance.
Service validation, as the name implies, is the feature of the governance
technology that validates that the services are “well formed” and prepared to
go into production. Service validation asks the question, Is this service valid
to the policies and to its expected behavior when in production
Auditing and logging means that the governance technology will track
the execution of the services and the policies, including what they do, when
they do it, and who they do it with. This allows those who manage the holistic
architecture to analyze auditing and logging information to determine
why problems occurred, or better yet, to prevent them. Auditing is required
by many legal compliance standards, such as those imposed on public companies
or those in regulated vertical markets such as health care.
Governance Dos and Don'ts
Governance is one of those things in the world of SOA and cloud computing
that is largely misunderstood. I can understand why: Different vendors define
it differently. However, as SOA/cloud computing problem domains become
continued