Service Governance: The Brains of Cloud

Analysts are defining service governance as the "brains" of cloud. If you consider a cloud's operating system and infrastructure to be essentially the muscles of a distributed environment, the service governor layer provides the brains – making intelligent, informed and automatic decisions about where to allocate pooled computing resources.

Find out more about Reliance, Univa's leading service governor product.

A Critical Cloud Element

For any company undertaking a cloud strategy, SLA and usage management should be considered key elements to their approach. This is foundation upon which they can ensure performance, monitor usage, and eventually charge back IT expenses to the customer or business unit. That's the vision of utility (and now Cloud) computing.

For example, in the case of a service provider who needs to support multiple services for dozens or hundreds of clients, this layer is absolutely essential for enabling variable, usage-based costing. In a nutshell, some clients need ultra-fast performance and others don't – the service governor decides which application gets which resources, eliminating error-prone manual intervention and ensuring application SLAs are met.

Without a service governor in place, these actions are performed manually and are based on infrastructure data which may or may not include application data – thus, without a service governor, resource provisioning in the cloud is error-prone, higher risk and less efficient, and does not necessarily serve the needs of the application exclusively (or at all).

How It Works

A service governor is essentially a runtime execution engine with inputs such as business priorities, IT service descriptions, service quality and cost policies. It uses real-time data feeds that assess application performance, and uses these to dynamically optimize the consumption of real and virtual resources to meet business requirements and service-level agreements (SLAs).

A service governor should be able to dynamically scale resources up and down as required by the application/user, keeping the environment optimized based on demand. It maintains up to date knowledge of policies, resources, services and SLAs, and it executes the services to achieve these SLAs.

Benefits

Organizations who employ service governance tools to optimize their internal or hybrid cloud environments enjoy:

• SLA-based application performance:

  Companies and service providers can set higher performance expectations with end users and can live up to them. Service governance enables fast, consistent application response on time, every time.

• Competitive advantage:

  Service providers who manage their cloud environment using a service governor can offer performance guarantees based on the metrics users care about, such as tight response times and availability, rather than on static hardware and system requirements.

• Optimized resource utilization:

  A service governor ensures that the right amount of capacity is always provisioned to support application demand – no more, no less. Thus users can eliminate unplanned downtime and outages and reduce physical and virtual server sprawl.

• Reduced costs:

  Service governance automates the process of intelligently provisioning resources, so companies can avoid unnecessary hardware purchases and meet capacity needs with fewer resources. And by provisioning only what you need, you avoid powering machines that don't add value to your business, thus reducing power costs.