The basics

- So lets talk about cloud governance. Governance is a loaded word, it means that we're controlling something and we're leading something and we're looking over something over time. In the world of cloud computing, it means that we're setting parameters around certain resources or certain services. For example, we may have an API that produces customer information. Well that API can be only leveraged during customer hours. That API can only be leveraged by particular people. That API can only externalize information they're authorized to see.

And all those sort of things are really kind of part of governance. It really provides guard rails to make sure that we're not abusing our resources, not necessarily on purpose, but by accident. That we're using resources as prescribed by certain policies that we're creating, and that we're in essence allowing the cloud-based system to operate effectively, because we're placing limits on ways it can be leveraged. So governance is one of the most important aspects of building cloud-based systems.

I can't stress this enough. It's often forgotten, so you'll find that most people that are building cloud-based systems are not paying attention to courses like this. So they're looking at security and management and monitoring and all that's fine, but you need governance too. Things are widely distributed and thus difficult to manage. So when you think about governance, you think about the ability to manage various systems that are widely distributed all over the place. In the case of governance, resource governance including multi-cloud governance is part of the trick.

So we may have Google cloud, we may have Microsoft cloud, we may have Amazon Web Services cloud, and then we have some sort of a governance tool, like a cloud management platform that sits over and above these multi cloud that allows us to allocate and deal with these resources through a single abstract interface. So these are the foundations of cloud governance. We have service governance, which basically governing APIs services. Security and governance, which are joined at the hip. Compliance and governance, in other words setting up compliance policies around making sure we don't run afoul of the law.

Governance tools, governance deployment, and then resource governance which is basically governing the major coarse grain resources that you find in the cloud, such as storage, compute services, things like that. So we'll see this framework a lot as a I break this down. The types of cloud governance solutions out there look like this. So we have cloud governance technology, and we have service-based governance, resource-based governance, and security and compliance. Service-based governance being APIs, web services, things like that. In other words, at a very fine grain level. Resource governance being things like storage and compute, that may have actually web services part of that but we're managing those resources as holistic resources.

And then security and compliance where we're actually linked in with various security systems to make sure that we're governing for policies that are set by security, and we're not in conflict with how the security system works or how the compliance system works. And under those we have run time, which is automated, active which is automated, as well as passive. In other words, something that's able to become automated and carry out its services at that particular time, versus something that will not carry out a particular service because it's passive. It's going to alert somebody, but it's not going to take care of the issue automatically.

And then we have active and passive under security and compliance as well. Then we have different underpinnings of that, service oriented, security oriented, design time oriented, you can read those yourself and we're going to get into those in later videos.