Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I attended a major vendor conference this week.  This particular vendor has a a modern line of current modern products, and also a set of 2nd generation mainframe products.  They’ve wisely bought a series of smaller product companies over the past decade to ensure their future. But the old product set continues to live on as well.  Yes they’re offering modern interfaces, web service enabling abilities and so forth.  And naturally they’re still investing in the original product set, as a cash cow should be milked as long as possible. One of the speakers I wanted to hear was speaking in the older product set track, so I made my way to that conference area.  As I entered it a generational change occurred.  EVERYONE, and I mean everyone, was 55 years old or older – with the majority seemingly very very close to retirement. There’s a clear hint from this sight for those using this product set.  We normally think of end of life for a technology as w...

I met with a major vendor technology evangelist recently (actually he called himself a technology space regional CTO) on the topic of noSQL and big data.  Now I’ll admit, like any technologist and architect, I have my areas of specialty and areas of less specific knowledge.  And as the IT industry continues to develop new technologies and approaches yearly, it’s challenging to stay up to date. So while I know relational databases well, can write good SQL and understand architecturally when to use database power functions like triggers, store procedures and the like, as well as database implementation level issues such as clustering, failover, performance, etc, I had not been paying attention to recent industry changes such as noSQL, graph databases and big data. This tech evangelist presented the concept of a particular noSQL tool, emphatically stating that the day of the relational database was over.  Relational databases are dead as a future technology.  H...