What Is Governance?

I’m going to answer that question eventually, but not right away. Instead, I want to explore how things have evolved so that we now need a whole chapter on governance in a book that is all about infrastructure in Azure. The best way is to go back to creating services on premises.

Many eons ago (well, a few years at least), the only way to host applications was to run them in your datacenter. This required significant investment, as facilities were required to hold large, expensive servers and their supporting infrastructure components, such as storage and networking. As applications moved from running on dedicated hardware to virtual machines, a problem manifested, as it now became easier to create resources, which resulted in virtual machine sprawl. Without the right guardrails, VMs would be created. There was little control or stewardship of VMs, and there was no way to track if VMs were still needed or even being used. On the business side, there was often...