SOA best practices reach for the clouds

Nevertheless, cloud services can benefit from the many lessons learned by enterprise SOA governance implementers, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for HP Software and Solutions. "Most important, you need a service catalog that maintains metadata about services and enables you to control development and construction of services and publish visibility and availability of services to consumers."

Also, federation agreements should be set up to auto-provision service definitions between public clouds and enterprises' SOA, REST and other application environments, Hall says. He says that after all, it's all about the service. From a macro view, the service can be directly equated to value, its contribution to how the service helps you make money, save money or mitigate risk.

Clearly, SOA governance is maturing as a discipline, while cloud computing -- the new galaxy in which services will burst forth -- is anything but. Unfortunately, the cloud arena may continue to evolve so fast over the next several years that it will be difficult for consensus service-governance practices to coalesce.

So the outlook for strong service governance in this brave new paradigm remains cloudy, but with scattered patches of promise.