Effective Automated Governance is Necessary for Taming NoOps and Open Cloud Architecture

To serve enterprise organization needs, PaaS, NoOps, and fast code deployment must be grounded in effective automated governance. Automated governance enables application and infrastructure services to efficiently scale across numerous consumers and providers while effectively monetizing, maintaining, and securing consumer-provider interactions.  Effective automated governance mitigates risks, improves performance, and facilitates correct actions.

A core governance tenet is publishing a service catalogue in a configuration management database (CMDB) or governance registry.  By publishing a service catalogue offering tiered levels of service, teams can promote standard Cloud application platform offerings that meet customer requirements.  By streamlining access and approval, automated governance encourages customers to choose standard offerings, minimize special configurations, and reduce platform maintenance cost.

Developers frequently desire to optimize their application platform stack, and the custom approach directly conflicts with standardizing platform offerings.  Many PaaS providers are promoting Open Cloud Architecture environments, which enable development teams to install any component and create custom architecture configurations.  Adopting Open Cloud Architecture without governance may result in diverse platform environments, onerous technical debt, and increased management overhead.

Successful teams will establish a Cloud Application Platform strategy, which minimizes platform configurations.  The strategy will promote re-using a complete application platform.  The team first creates standard application platform service offerings and loads the descriptions into a registry.  An AppFactory store enables development teams to browse and select the platform services meeting project requirements. Instead of installing custom frameworks, development teams will subscribe to standard application platform infrastructure services (e.g. business process engine, rules engines, caching service, transformation).  Standard languages (e.g. XSLT, BPMN) and APIs (e.g. JSR 107, JSR 236) decouple implementation from interface, and limit the need for hyper-optimization. Upon subscription, the store can trigger approval workflow, record billing rules, provision service level agreement policies, and register application-to-service dependencies in a governance registry.

Is your organization experiencing PaaS sprawl, unexpected platform management overhead, and increasing maintenance complexity?