Lately, there's been plenty of discussion among the chattering classes (myself included) how the things we've learned and developed for SOA governance should and could be readily applied to cloud services. Tarak Modi, in fact, recently discussed the critical need for cloud governance in a recent article here at ebiizQ.
Dave Linthicum, author of Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, and a fellow contributor here at the Big Q, also forcefully makes the point that its time to bring cloud services under the same governance umbrella as SOA-aware services.
Now, it appears that some vendors appear to be doing just that. This week, AmberPoint, best known for its SOA management platform, and SOA Software, which has been in the governance game for a few years, both announced new governance offerings, and both point to the clouds. Until recently, SOA governance offerings have centered around Web services-intensive deployments, such as SOAP-based services. These offerings extend their reach to REST-based services and beyond, both vendors say.
I just had a chance to talk with Ed Horst, chief marketing officer, and Dhruv Gupta, vice president of product marketing and management, at AmberPoint about their company's entry into the governance space, and what they intend to do differently.
Ed pointed out that AmberPoint Governance System provides discovery and registry/repository for all forms of services and definitions. As he put it: "This product is very open the way we look at services. Not just SOAP services. It can be any shared aspect can be modeled as a service or a resource. Furthermore, customers can go in and extend the data models and the definitions in the environment to cover any object. Whether its a service, non-service, or any asset or resource, you can be governing documents."
Some of the cloud capabilities that are already built it into is cloud discovery, you can point it at cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services and so on. AmberPoint Governance System takes it from there."
The AmberPoint solution emphasizes a federated repository/registry for all application assets and resources available within the enterprise, the vendor says. That's because few enterprises operate from a "single disk drive," as Ed put it. "Governance solutions have a centralized view of the world. Most organizations we work with dont operate that way, don't have a single database or repository for all groups across the enterprise."
For its part, SOA Software announced what it calls its "Atmosphere" cloud services governance initiative, which creates a unifying brand for a suite of SOA and cloud services governance products. The company says the upcoming Atmosphere products -- to start delivery in early 2010 -- are designed to help customers and partners take advantage of the opportunity for cost savings and agility benefits possible through the combination of SOA and cloud computing.
For example, Atmosphere Broker, the first product, is designed to provide service governance capabilities including visibility, management, monitoring, measurement, provisioning, validation, and reporting for cloud services.
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