I am working on my book called Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) and am working on the chapter about data considerations in the cloud. In this post I will share a few of the topics that are discussed in the book for this chapter. Analyzing data requirements There are many characteristics of data that should be taken into consideration when building cloud services. Here is a... Read More
Cloud Fail: Top 10 reasons we fail in the cloud
I am working on my book called Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Service Models and I need a break from all the seriousness and rigor that goes into writing a technology book. I thought I would try to write something slightly funny to break up the monotony and to get some notes for my book down so I can prepare my next chapter. My third chapter is called Cloud Computing Worst Practices. My book will discuss this topic in more... Read More
Minimal Viable Architecture
One of the tasks in agile methodologies is to agree on what the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for each sprint is. This allows the team to get software in the hands of users sooner before investing a ton of time and money into it. The sooner people get to visualize the software and test the usability, the faster we get real requirements. As we all know from years of waterfall development, writing down all of the requirements on paper and then... Read More
Can you really be agile without an agile architecture?
The answer to that question depends on how agility is measured. If agility is measured in the delivery of user stories then the answer is yes. If a team is very good at an agile process yet the underlying architecture prohibits the types of changes the business really needs and wants, then the answer is no. I think agility should be measured in a team’s ability to meet business demand. Delivering quickly is one thing, being able to... Read More
Availability is all about trade offs: A story about uptime
The bloggers are out denouncing the cloud and even demanding we fire CTOs and sysadmins from companies that were impacted by the latest AWS outage. Most of us that have any common sense at all know that building highly available sites is part architecture and part luck. You have to design for failures and hope that when failures occur they are the types of failures you anticipated and built for. Nobody can ever provide 100% uptime and... Read More
Scaling in the Cloud – Part 1: Distributing the load
One of the advantages of cloud computing is the ability to quickly scale applications and services to meet the demand of the business. Compute resources can be “procured” in minutes via API requests as opposed to the old procurement process of the ”purchase and wait” method from days gone past. There are many ways to scale a cloud application or service. I will discuss a few of them in this post. The... Read More
IT Governance and the Air Traffic Control Tower analogy
When people hear the word governance, they often associate it with the word government which makes them think about politics, waste, high costs, blown budgets, and very slow progress. The goal of IT governance is the complete opposite of all of those characteristics. IT Governance strives to assist in decision making based on best practices and guidance, not politics. It strives to remove waste and optimize costs by taking an... Read More
Is the Cloud driving better software?
As companies shift to delivering software as a service (SaaS) or platforms (PaaS) the customer demand for increased security, closely measured SLAs, complete disaster recovery plans, and 24×7 availability is driving more rigid technical requirements. You can thank the cloud for this. Traditionally software companies built packaged software that only required a fraction of the technical requirements that today’s cloud services... Read More
The future lives outside your firewall
Many companies are still debating the value of the cloud. Whether a company moves to the cloud or not, one thing is for sure. Most of their customers, suppliers, and technology partners are going to the cloud with or with them. To build something that is sustainable, reliable, and scalable in the cloud, it forces developers (or it should) to think in terms of loosely coupled services, focus much more on application security, and design for... Read More
Building Enterprise Solutions in the Cloud
I recently spoke at the Business of Cloud Computing Conference in San Diego on June 15 and gave the following presentation. Architecting enterprise solutions in the cloud View more presentations from Mike Kavis I started the presentation by discussing how my startup, M-Dot Network, built a high speed and secure transaction network that connects Point-of-Sale systems to our cloud in real-time. I talked about how three guys on a limited... Read More
