Cloud Computing Will NOT Kill Design Time Governance
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 04:12 PM
After a few days away from the office, I came back with renewed enthusiasm for 2010.
As I made my way through my inbox and got caught up on the latest industry news, I was surprised by David Linthicum's Infoworld blog entry titled, "Cloud Computing Will Kill These 3 Technologies." In his post, Linthicum states that cloud computing will kill design time governance.
What makes the blogosphere so great is that we're all entitled to voice our opinions. So I will now share mine in response to Linthicum's post because his view is a bit askew from what I know is happening in the real world.
Now if you've been reading any of my previous blog posts, you'll know that I believe nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, right before Thanksgiving I blogged about the importance of design time governance for cloud computing in the entry titled, "Governance: A cloud computing strategy's silver lining."
The bottom line is this: if we cut corners at the beginning of the development process, we will almost always create gaps in the cloud resulting in the proliferation of bad code and applications. If in fact more services are accessed, sometimes anonymously, from God knows where, in fact the quality of those services now destined to be used and reused must in fact of an even higher quality. Sounds like design time governance to me.
Now you're probably thinking, ‘of course he's going to push design time governance.' And that's true to a certain extent from the perspective of creating and distributing better software throughout our infrastructures especially as services make their way into the cloud. From a practical point of view, I'd tell anybody purchasing technology to select the vendor that's best suited to addressing his or her particular business needs.
But when it comes to the statement that cloud computing is the death knell for design time governance, I simply have a hard time believing this. Especially coming from Linthicum, the pragmatist.
Sure, aspects of design do go away by using cloud-related resources but it's unimaginable that most serious organizations will believe that run time is enough. On the contrary, utilization of cloud resources brings forward new design governance challenges. For example, when and how should cloud resources be used, do they support the proper technologies, functionality and performance we expect?
I'm not sure which ‘runtime SOA players' David is referring to when he says ‘many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required.' I'm quite frankly shocked at this statement because to the best of my knowledge, most of those runtime SOA governance players support little to no automated design time governance.
I suspect the theory that cloud computing will kill design time governance is up there with other marketing campaigns that declared XYZ technology is dead. Sure, they make great headlines and get some of us all worked up but they're not very practical or realistic.
If anybody knows who those existing runtime SOA governance vendors are that can supposedly obliterate separate design tools, please drop me a line at jeff@weblayers.com or comment below on whether or not you think the cloud will kill design time governance.