Cloud governance is the set of policies, processes and controls an organization uses to manage cloud resources securely, compliantly and cost-effectively. It defines who can create what, how resources must be configured, how spend is controlled, and how compliance is proven.
A cloud governance framework usually covers five areas: security and identity, compliance, cost management, resource configuration standards, and operations. Each needs both a written policy and a way to enforce it.
When infrastructure is created through code, the most reliable enforcement point is the code itself. Governing Terraform plans and Ansible Playbooks before execution means non-compliant resources are never created. Steampunk Spotter enforces these rules for Ansible and Terraform at commit and in CI/CD.
Cloud-native governance tools include AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies, Azure Policy and Google Cloud Organization Policy. For infrastructure code, policy-as-code and IaC governance tools enforce the same rules before deployment.
