Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

- When linking two systems, with one system providing data to another system, the providing system's physical environment must be sized for the capacity of the requesting system and the reliability of the requesting system. Another way of saying this is that the providing system must meet or exceed the quality of service or SLA of the requesting system. - In the example I was reviewing, the HR system was the base for the desired information and was sized for the user capacity of the HR department and the reliability impact of an outage of the HR department. If it is to be used as a real-time providing system for Department B, it's capacity must be increased from the HR department (10 users) to the capacity of the Department B user base, the main business area (3,000 users). It must also have it's redundancy increased to provide no outages. - Alternatively, when there is a mismatch between capacity and reliability of the providing system and requesting system, the

SOA design time governance products come with a variety of methods to categorize the services or assets.  Interestingly I’m currently working on a project involving a document management system, and the select document management tools comes with almost an identical selection of categorization methods.  These include trees, taxonomies, and domains among others. In some of the earlier SOA design time governance implementations I performed, we spent significant time working on the categorizations – trying to make the catalog and information easy to traverse for the various user categories that would encounter in.  (In the case of design time governance, this might be analysts, architects, developers, QA, and IT management.) We invariably found designing the categories and approaches took a tremendous amount of time, with every constituency having different ideas and requesting various adjustments to the approach.  To some extent it became the never ending quest for the perfect str

Software AG’s Natural language and development environment for the mainframe (IBM z/OS and CICS) offered many nice improvements over COBOL for mainframe software development.  Software AG developed a nice market niche in the mainframe development tools market, and millions of lines of code were developed and continue to run till today. Like IBM’s version of COBOL, the vendor has struggled to extend Natural’s lifespan and the life of the code written in it.  Initially Software AG created a communication bridging tool (called EntireX), allowing bi-direction communication between the Natural environment and Web Services or MQ or Java or .Net.  But like IBM came out with “native” web services as part of CICS 3 and Enterprise COBOL, Software AG has web service enabled Natural.  And web service enablement includes the handling of (simplified) XML.  From the code sample I was able to find, it appears that Natural IS NOT handling the building of the HTTP headers, requiring them to be