I’ve recently joined the talented people at Sixtree and consequently am blogging over there. Please check it out.
(Not much to see here in the meantime)
pushing soa up the slope (with a pointy stick)
August 1st, 2012 — soa
I’ve recently joined the talented people at Sixtree and consequently am blogging over there. Please check it out.
(Not much to see here in the meantime)
September 6th, 2011 — soa
This is a few months old, but Werner Vogels republishes the Amazon.com Shareholder Letter. A summary of how the quintessential 21st century company views its competitive advantage:
Regarding Service Orientation:
Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic that encapsulate the data they operate on and provide hardened interfaces as the only way to access their functionality. This approach reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system. Service-oriented architecture — or SOA — is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. Thanks to a thoughtful and far-sighted team of engineers and architects, this approach was applied at Amazon long before SOA became a buzzword in the industry. Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. For example, to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer.
May 2nd, 2011 — architecture, distributed-computing
You’ve probably heard that Amazon AWS had some problems recently. A question on Stackoverflow recently pointed out a detailed summary of the problem posted on the AWS message board.
Obviously every distributed system is different and every outage is unique so it is difficult to generalise. Some takeways I have are:
January 15th, 2011 — architecture
Steve Jones reminds us that the business doesn’t care about technology – so stop harping about it and using it as an excuse for underperformance.
I totally agree that this is a key reason behind the endemic business/IT culture divide that is the root of many problems.
However this poses an obvious question – who does care about the technology?. The trick is not to over-engineer, but to engineer to just the right level to deliver business value now and into the future.
Somebody has to care about the technology (products, tools, methodologies), because otherwise you lose control and foster a legacy of technical debt which ultimately erodes business value.
I guess this is an axiom of Enterprise Architecture – that lack of governance leads to chaos and inefficiencies. Some would argue with this assertion, but I have never seen a counter-example. And of course the inverse statement is not necessarily true either.
So if the business doesn’t care about technology then who does? And if that is “nobody” then what happens?
November 20th, 2010 — soa
In systems architecture, there are rarely any right answers – mostly just trade offs between one solution or another. In such cases it helps to bear in mind some fundamental principles as a guideline. One principle I often use is cost vs. benefit. Another useful principle is to minimize coupling between systems. Coupling is pervasive and leads to a kind of inertia in enterprise systems. Newton discovered that inertia prevents change and if there is one thing that enterprises struggle most with, it’s change.