We had an internal technology session last night and I was on a panel where each of us was asked to come up with the IT aspects of an enterprise architecture for a small (100 people) financial services organisation. My approach was based upon building up a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and then deploying it onto the cloud, which can then scale with the business.

Elastic computing makes a lot of sense in this context for several reasons, but the primary one is that information technology probably isn't (and arguably shouldn't be) the core focus of most small organisations. In other words, take advantage of software as a service, and have that scale with your business by dumping it on the cloud.

While some businesses are using this approach, there are some "interesting" questions to be answered about cloud computing before I think I'd actually propose it for some types of business. First off, there's data privacy and security. I don't want my data on the cloud and I'm sure that many businesses feel the same way. Additionally, there are some other issues around compliance and interoperability (see Cloud computing hysteria paralyzed by bolt of reality for more details on this).

Cloud computing might not be feasible for some applications at the moment, but it is another approach for us as architects to evaluate.

Responses[6]

Posted by Simon Brown on 01 May 2008 12:01:00 BST #

Here are the details of the May London User Group.

• Title : Building a high volume, low latency system in Java
• Summary : This session will provide some insight into the architecture, design and development of a greenfield high volume, low latency trading and pricing system. Topics include :
  • The architecture and design itself.
  • How the early development of an executable reference architecture was used to help prove the low latency requirements.
  • The structure of the team and how the architecture was shared between a team of architects.
  • How mainstream technologies such as Java 5, Spring, JMS, and Oracle were used to successfully deliver a solution where other technologies like C++ might be the immediate first choice for low latency applications.
• Speaker : Moudud Ahmed, Detica
• Date : Tuesday, 6th May 2008
• Time : 18:30-20:00
• Location : Skills Matter, 1 Sekforde Street
• Format : Presentation followed by a breakout for discussion, with further discussion in a local pub (The Crown).
• Cost : Free, but registration is required.

Many thanks to Skills Matter for sponsoring the user group.

Responses[4]

Posted by Simon Brown on 25 April 2008 14:30:52 BST #

We've built up a decent amount of architecture related content over the last two years and I'm pleased to announce that we're going to take this step further by extending and formalizing what we have already into a book. We're still working through the details, but our goal is to come up with a practical and pragmatic guide to software architecture. There are lots of books about the process side of software architecture, but very few about how you actually undertake the role. That's the gap that our book will be attempting to fill.

We've already put up a page about the book, detailing the sorts of topics it will cover, with the book itself being broken down into the following chapters.

1. What is Architecture?
2. About the Architect Role
3. Non-Functional Requirements
4. Technology Selection
5. Defining and Sharing an Architecture
6. Applying the Architecture
7. Software Architecture in the Real World

We're still thinking about the best way to publish the book, although we're leaning towards structuring the book as a series of essays (like Getting Real by 37signals) and by publishing each of the essays in a number of formats. We have a couple of essays that are nearly ready to go and we'll be looking to build up the book incrementally over the coming weeks and months. If there's anything extra that you'd like to see in the book, please let us know.

Add a comment

Posted by Simon Brown on 25 April 2008 10:32:53 BST #