Cloud computing makes SOA governance complex

Another problem with cloud computing is that people are unfamiliar with cloud computing. Perhaps with the growing popularity of cloud computing and eventually becoming mainstream, this fear will vanish, but it may take some time.

"As cloud computing and SOA converge, there is a growing need for governance strategies and governance technologies." ">david Linthicum, a partner in SOA and cloud computing consulting, Linthicum, said:" Today, Many of our customers are still in the experimental phase of the cloud computing model, including developing cloud strategies and testing the effects of cloud computing with small projects. However, I expect that this will be a big change by the end of this year, when many business processes, applications and information will be stored in the remote cloud, and correspondingly, the need for governance will increase. ”

The best way to deploy cloud services is to selectively outsource specific applications and infrastructure services rather than blindly follow suit. Therefore, the primary decision in cloud and SOA governance is to decide which services should be provided by which public cloud, thereby avoiding unnecessary duplication within the enterprise.

"It is necessary to decide which services should or should not be provided in some way, what benefits and risks are used in some way, and whether the enterprise can accept these risks." "The most common risk is that companies plunge into the cloud and subscribe to a number of external cloud services without considering centralized control and governance or a lack of overall planning," said Dana Gardner, chief analyst at David Linthicum. ”

He added: "At the same time, there is also the risk of being too dead, too focused and controllable, without effectively leveraging the advantages of cloud computing." The final result is a lot of money spent, but can not quickly keep up with the changes in the market. ”

Over the next few years, we should be able to see some tools of SOA governance continue to enter the cloud market to help address the needs of enterprise IT personnel.

"Today, if it is able to plan ahead on how to use cloud computing, they are already ahead of others, both internally, externally and internally," Gardner said, "On the road to new IT models, Early adoption of SOA best practices and strong governance for IT services and all IT assets is key to gaining competitive advantage. ”

Cloud makes SOA governance complex

While it is difficult to see a case report on SOA governance in a cloud service environment in many of the announcements about cloud services, most public cloud service providers provide governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, and service levels deployed in their own environments.

Today, more and more vendors are available to provide tools for managing services that run on a wide variety of public clouds and private clouds. However, the cloud computing environment is not yet mature, so in the past these SOA governance tool vendors have not been able to provide effective tools to manage cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging, and service levels.

And even if cloud services are really mainstream, these services were created from the outset in accordance with SOA governance specifications and still face many challenges in managing them. These difficulties stem from the characteristics of the new model of cloud computing: Public clouds based on proprietary technologies, virtual resource pools, and the combination of services through mashups.

Comprehensive SOA governance requires a unified strategy to manage all applications, platforms, and network domains (this is very difficult in a slightly more complex enterprise network environment), or to establish alliances (or federations) between autonomous domains in accordance with certain specifications.

The SOA Federation, which manages the internal or business-to-business supply chain, is very complex because it involves connecting the internal application domain with the public cloud services provided by one or more subcontractors (such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, salesforce.com, etc.) to form a whole. To achieve your goals, you need to have the negotiating skills to win the Nobel Peace Prize.