29 July 2018
It’s easy to get caught up in unrealistic notions that you can re-write a legacy system or gradually decompose it. There are other, more pragmatic approaches that can help to modernise architectures and enable new development.
10 July 2018
Microsoft have added a Kafka façade to Azure Event Hubs, presumably in the hope of luring Kafka users onto its platform. This makes sense as the platforms have a lot in common, though there are some missing Kafka features that may prove critical.
18 June 2018
Fitness functions can be a useful metaphor for guiding an emerging architecture, but you do have to invest in making sure they describe the right outcome.
3 June 2018
Not only are layered applications difficult to maintain, but the common abstractions they are built on tend to give rise to inflexible implementations that have serious scalability challenges.
8 May 2018
You’re rarely given the opportunity to focus on transitioning an architecture to the exclusion of everything else. You may have to get used to the idea that decomposing a monolith is a direction of travel rather than a clear destination.
25 April 2018
REST API design is dependent on the clients that will be consuming the resources - APIs that are designed for server-based integrations tend to look quite different from those that are designed to support mobile applications.
20 March 2018
If you find REST APIs difficult to design, develop and scale, then your experience with GraphQL is not going to be any easier.
9 March 2018
One of the main benefits of microservices is that they reduce the cost of change. The problem is that you need to make a significant up-front investment to realise this saving. Your first few microservices are more likely to be an expensive and potentially painful undertaking.
16 February 2018
Agile teams still need to make architecture decisions, but in supporting them architects should seek “just enough” architecture over “big design up front” and practical solutions over large-scale abstract thinking.
27 January 2018
On the face of it, TOGAF describes a very different world to the agile preference for working software over documentation. That doesn’t mean that TOGAF is incompatible with agile, so long as you’re prepared to adapt its numerous building blocks.
12 January 2018
The compatibility shim was added to .Net Standard to make it easier to reference libraries compiled using the .Net Framework. That just leaves you with the problem of missing APIs…
13 December 2017
Finely-grained, entity-based services seem to be advocated by some pretty authoritative sources. This is unfortunate as they are something of an anti-pattern that can undermine many of the benefits of decomposing an monolith into micoservices.
18 November 2017
Technical debt may be a useful metaphor for describing how bad code design undermines productivity to non-technical audiences, but it does not help in understanding the longer term problems that affect code bases.
4 November 2017
An event-driven architecture can give rise to complex chains of events that are difficult to manage. These problems can be mitigated through careful design rather than resorting to shared state databases or workflow engines.
12 October 2017
The Scaled Agile Framework talks about an “architectural runway” as the main deliverable for agile architecture, yet it’s vague on the detail of what this looks like.