Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

  The Datapower has an internal structure of components that can inherit or be reused, depending on their place in the inheritance chain.  Here’s the secret internal architecture of the DataPower:   And here’s the Datapower’s capabilities in a nutshell:   Multi-Protocol Gateway: (superset of XML Firewall) Transformations – Any-to-any transformation engine: MPGW can parse and transform arbitrary binary, flat text, and XML messages, including EDI, COBOL Copybook, ISO 8583, CSV, ASN.1, and ebXML. Transport Bridging – protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, MQ, SSL, IMS Connect, FTP, and more Message-level Security - Messages can be filtered, validated, encrypted, and signed, helping to provide more secure enablement of high-value applications. Supported technologies include WS-Security, WS-Trust, SAML, and LDAP. Logging - logging and audit trail, including non-repudiation support Web Service Proxy: Schema Validation Policy Application SLA Monitori...

Twenty five years ago my boss handed me the primary billing program and described a series of new features needed. The program was about 4 years old and had been worked on by 5 different programmers. It had an original design model, but between all the modifications, bug fixes, patches and quick new features thrown in, the original design pattern was impossible to discern. Any pattern was impossible to discern. It had become, to quote what’s titled the most common architecture pattern of today, ‘a big ball of mud’. After studying the program for several days, I informed my boss the program was untouchable. The effort to make anything more than a minor adjustment carried such a risk, as the impact could only be guessed at, that it was easier and less risky to rewrite it from scratch. If they had considered the future impact, they never would have let a key program degenerate that way. They would have invested the extra effort to maintain it’s design, document it property, and consider ...

Why is a Cisco router $10,000 and a Linksys router $100? Or perhaps the better question is why are your network guys willing to pay $10,000 for a Cisco router when a Linksys router can be purchased for $100? The answer is that Cisco routers have multiple layers of reliablity, managability, and security that Linksys routers don't. But 100x (100 times) difference? Is it really worth 100 times difference? The network is the backbone of your IT infrastructure. If your network goes down, all the IT systems stop working and so does much (if not all) of your company's operations. And keeping that up, being alerted early to problems, being able to reroute and resolve problems, that is indeed worth 100 times difference. When creating traditional big-box applications, the traditional components are: The Application You Wrote The Container or Runtime The Application Server The Database The Database Server (When we move to an application with a web GUI, you can add a web server in ther...