Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

When you place applications and services on a

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

public cloud, you give up some control. You may be left open to new security, integration and financial risks. To cope with cloud challenges, as with earlier SOA challenges, you will probably consider implementing some form of cloud and SOA governance. In this Solutions Spotlight, readers will learn essential tips for implementing a SOA governance strategy. SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
By: James A. Denman Is the glass half full or half empty? That is still a valid question to be asked of SOA governance strategies and tools. Arguably, use of SOA governance is the single key indicator of whether an organization is committed to SOA. But its use is not yet widespread. More than half of respondents to SearchSOA.coms Readership Challenges & Priorities 2011 -2012 Survey indicated that they have no plans with regards to SOA governance software. This may explain why so many respondents also cited complexity and lack of flexibility as their biggest pain points. We reached out to SOA and cloud expert David Linthicum to learn more about the relationship between proper SOA governance and lightweight, flexible enterprise architecture. David Linthicum is the founder and CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, the author or coauthor of at least 13 book s on computing, and an internationally k nown distributed computing and application integration expert. He has more than twenty years of experience in the integration technology industry. SearchSOA.com: Can SOA become easier to use? (And how, or why not?) Linthicum: SOA is really an architectural pattern, thus the ease-of-use is really dependent on how you use it, not SOA itself. SOA is becoming easier to understand and leverage considering that the way weve been designing

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Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

and implementing systems has really morphed into a development and architectural path that is best approached using SOA [techniques] such as the use of complex distributed systems, including cloud computing. Service governance is something that you can actually carry out without technology. David Linthicum, Blue Mountain Labs The concept of breaking a system down to its component parts, and building it back up again as sets of services that can be configured and reconfigured into business solutions is actually much easier to understand than more traditional architectural approaches. Can SOA be lightweight? Linthicum: SOA can be anything you want it to be considering that its really something you do. SOA can be leveraged as a way of doing something, and you can certainly pick and choose the parts of SOA you would like to leverage. Are governance and lightweight opposite concepts? Linthicum: Not really. Service governance is something that you can actually carry out without t echnology. Its really more about people and processes. Thus, you can dial-it down to whatever you need, either leveraging complex sets of processes and governance technology, or simple processes and disciplines.

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

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Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

By: Valerie Sarnataro When you place applications and services on a public cloud, you give up some control. You may be left open to new security, integration and financial risks. To cope with cloud challenges, as with earlier SOA challenges, you will probably consider implementing some form of cloud governance. There are both differences and similarities between the governance environment in SOA and in cloud computing architectures. Viewers say the runtime side of governance takes some precedence when cloud applications go live. Will people moving up to the cloud dismiss SOA governance as yesterdays news? That would be a bad step, according to Scott Morrison, CTO of Layer 7 Technologies. In reality, what you should be doing is l ooking at what worked with SOA governance, because there were a lot of good basic ideas there and a lot of good technology, said Morrison. Build on that as you go up in the cloud. There is a ''holy trinity of issues in the cloud,'' said Paul Muller, Vice President, Strategic Marketing, Software Products, HP. These include: security, integration and cost management all areas that governance can address. This becomes increasingly important as distributed clouds face the challenge of keeping track of whos consuming individual but related services and which business processes. As vendors are changing their application interfaces and you are changing your application, you want to make sure the appropriate change management and governance [capabilities are] there, said Muller. And from there, we can start to do things just as we do in the SOA world, to apply automated policy.

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Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

Runtime governance

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

Similar to SOA governance, which can be broken down into two major types, design time and runtime, cloud services governance can be distinguished by the same categories. Though design time governance, the designing of policies that will exist around service access control, was much more prevalent on premise traditional computing, runtime governance takes first priority in cloud, according to David S. Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs. All services need to be put under the same sort of governance framework, said Linthicum. And typically thats going to be a runtime framework that is able to control access to those services, define those services and how they mature, figure out if those services change, which is important since you dont control them, and figure out how your gove rnance system meshes with security. Linthicum emphasizes that the enforcement of government on a day to day basis and creating a unified governance structure are key issues in cloud, especially when you choose to blend services from separate clouds for example, Amazon and Sales Force and connect those to separate internal networks and private clouds within your own enterprise. "When you move into cloud the same patterns exist [as in SOA], however, it is on a much more runtime environment,'' said Linthicum. ''Governance becomes much more important because we are mixing and matching services from a variety of different places to form our solutions.'' Gartner's Daryl Plummer also emphasizes the importance of runtime governance in cloud environments. He stresses that governing cloud services is about governing a business, rather than software components, as providers experienced with SOA. In the cloud world, some responsible party has to be there to make sure the service is running every minute of every day , said Plummer. Its not about writing the service and putting it in a repository, and letting a developer figure

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Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

out how to use it later. Its a living, breathing service thats running every day.

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

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Essential Playbook for SOA Goverance

Contents
SOA Governance Breeds Lightweight, Flexible Enterprise Architecture
Cloud Governance and SOA Governance: Similar but Different?

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