For all the hype surrounding cloud services, it's difficult to find case studies of effective SOA governance in this brave new environment. Nevertheless, most public cloud service providers offer governance tools for managing applications, virtual machines, integration logic and service levels deployed in their specific environments. And a growing range of vendors -- including , , and -- are providing tools for provisioning and managing services across various public and private cloud environments. However, as befits the immature state of cloud computing, none of the established SOA governance tool vendors supports management of cloud-based applications, transactions, messaging or service levels.

Furthermore, even as cloud services become more mainstream, and even if they were built from the ground up with SOA governance in mind, they would still be very challenging to manage. This difficulty stems from some hallmarks of this new paradigm: outsourcing service providers, proprietary public clouds, virtualized resource pools and mashup-style service creation.

Comprehensive SOA governance depends on having all application, platform and network domains under common policy-based administration -- a rare occurrence in enterprise networks of any complexity -- or on having instituted federation among autonomous domains.

Managing SOA federations within an enterprise or B2B supply chain can be dauntingly complex. But managing SOA federations that link internal application domains with those provided by one or more outsourcers -- including public cloud service providers such as , , , and -- depends on negotiation skills worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Federated clouds would help