I recently needed to consider the state of a System Architecture and consider the changes likely to be needed over time. Thus, I was trying to produce a “Roadmap” for the architecture into the future. The challenge was that the future is uncertain. Some items can be planned for, and others are dependent on the way the business and technological environments develop. These developments can be considered to be the product of various “forces” playing out in the environment of the system. How then can you address this complexity? Continue reading ‘Future Scenarios in Architecture…’ »
Posts tagged ‘architecture’
It would seem that “Service Oriented Architecture” (SOA) is taking off as a technology in fashion. As usual, most of the news is generated by people wanting to sell it as the next big thing ready for the prime time. If followed as it is being sold at present, the concept is liable to lead to significant performance problems. SOA is sold on having a large number of “users” who are then often other systems. This is followed all the way back to the real users through an unknown number of tiers. The complexity of managing this sort of architecture increases significantly as the number of tiers increases. If this is then managed without due consideration for managing the system capacity and performance the result will be problems in the future. That is not to say that I don’t see a benefit in the overall technology – there is great potential. Just consider carefully how the performance of operational systems might be proven to be sufficient for the long term.
In a previous employment, the employer had an operational department who were responsible for signing off the performance of a system before it was allowed in to production. Their method for doing this was working with delivery projects to make sure that the project provided sufficient evidence that the system they were delivering would perform in the long term. They would also check that the operational managers had access to appropriate mechanisms to monitor that the systems were performing according to the evidence that had been provided. When requested to do so they would provide expertise to the delivery projects in the appropriate use of capacity management techniques, but they were primarily a gate keeping and monitoring function. Continue reading ‘Governance of Capacity Management’ »
