Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

In the space of Software Architecture, the “Big Ball of Mud” represents “natural growth” – or the system that just adds and changes without ANY planned architecture.  ( More on the Big Ball of Mud here .)  While we hear about it, and sometimes run into it as we have to solve project problems, how do you spot a software product in that mode? Side note… while traditionally a Big Ball of Mud is discussing gradual changes to a system or program, we also see a Big Ball of Mud in enterprise architecture in unplanned natural growth of the addition of various systems and technologies, and interfaces and interconnections between them.  While dealing with spaghetti code is tough, dealing with spaghetti connections and systems is extremely expensive and risky – but is all too frequent. Here’s a software product conversation I had this week …   Please wait for a site operator to respond.   You are now chatting with 'Randy'.   Your Issue ID for th...

To understand what makes easy integration or a “good web service”, it’s worth taking a glance at the historical methods of I.T. systems integration.  After all, business systems have been passing data around and/or activating each other, aka integrating, for almost as long as there has been commercial I.T. business systems (approximately since 1960).  The first major “interface” method between systems was throwing sequential fixed-length record files at each other.  This was pretty much the only method for 20 years and still remains in widespread use, though mostly around mainframe and legacy systems.  The system providing the interface, either outputting the data or providing a format for which to send it data, defines a field by field interface record, along with header and footer records.  Because these are fixed length records, the descriptive definition (the human readable documentation) must include the format and length of each field, along with any spe...

Some years ago I interviewed a CIO of a Fortune 500 IT vendor as part of an Integration Improvement project. His responses helped shape the goals and roadmap of the project, as business drivers and goals should always be taken into account in how one models the architecture and integration space.   The interview gives a great view of IT management business drivers in the integration space.  Company identifying information has been removed. Question: How is integration? -- Almost everyone at our company is an expert on Information Systems. -- Our culture - everyone (department/division) believes their own numbers and requirements and doesn't believe anyone else's. Words like "mutual understanding" or "common terminology" didn't exist in the past. The reason there is no real enterprise integration because of how the company is running. Each unit built their own systems. The other units came to IT and said "buy this for us or build t...

Israel is under frequent, as frequent as every 10 minutes, rocket attack from Gaza.  While the Iron Dome rocket interception system has become famous as a technological marvel in the defense of the country, there are other technological marvels of note as well. The first step of any civil defense system is getting the civilians out of the way or under cover.  Israel has a network of neighborhood bomb shelters, building bomb shelters, and (in new construction) a “hardened room” in every private residence and on every floor of every office building.  When air raids were measured in hours or tens of minutes, all of these were adequate together with a nationwide network of air raid sirens. But modern circumstances have brought two new problems: - Rocket attack warnings are measured in SECONDS.  Fifteen seconds in towns near border regions, and 90-120 seconds in the center of the country. - As the country has suffered suburban sprawl, built malls and cinema mega...

An Architect Friend sent me this extended architecture question... I recently joined a company that provides business consulting (via many MBAs) services related to sales and marketing .  Most clients are large pharma companies . In addition to consultants, there are business process outsourcing teams (offshore) that do operations (like incentive plan management, report distribution, etc.)   There is also BI/reporting group that creates BI/DW solutions (custom ones using template approach) for large clients .  Plus there is an Software Development group (SD) . Over the years the Software Development group of the company created various (10+) browser-based (.NET/SQL) point-solutions/tools to help consultants (and eventually some head-quarters users) perform specific tasks. For example: - Designing sales territories and managing the alignment of reps to territories - Custom ETL-based tools to perform incentive calcu...