We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.
Deloitte Platform Engineering has built experience and knowledge of delivering complex solutions that span organisational domains. These large scale, cross domain solutions bring added complexities to delivery. Our experience shows that by taking a different view to the problem you can deliver more than just a technology outcome.
Continue readingThe technical advancements in every aspect of software development lifecycle make it clear that there are more than one solution to any problem. In this article I examine Istio’s service mesh capabilities to address issues that developers face while creating microservices and compare it with the widely adopted Netflix frameworks. Istio takes away many of these microservices concerns from the developer and delegates them to operations where collective behaviours can be managed better.
Continue readingAustralia has one of the highest rates of personal debt in the world. Estimates indicate that the average Australian owns at least 1 credit card and that roughly 57% of our $2 trillion personal debt is attributable to mortgages. These statistics lend themselves to the assumption that majority of Australians have at some point in their life experienced the process of applying for a line of credit.
Continue readingData retention has become a crucial topic over the past few years, with organisations continuously exploring better ways to define and implement secure processes that cater to their needs. This becomes increasingly difficult when most of our data is stored/generated in the cloud, hence, requiring a flexible and innovative approach towards managing our data assets.
Continue readingLast week I gave a presentation at the first meetup for Melbourne Microservices. Since many of us are aware of the general characteristics of microservices I wanted to survey the broader context of forces driving the emergence of microservices as a potential new application architecture.
Continue readingIs PaaS the secret sauce for the Composable Enterprise? Certainly Warner Music Group and their CTO Jonathan Murray have put a lot of effort into using CloudFoundry as the container for applications in their new enterprise. But I think PaaS is only one side of the coin.
Continue readingIn almost every integration project in existence, you’ll find that at some point you need to map one set of representative values to another. It doesn’t take long to think of a few common examples. Lets take two hypothetical systems named Xup and Yonder. How do they each represent countries in addresses?
Continue readingContinuing my series on the Composable Enterprise I’m looking at how different thought-leaders and organizations perceive the shift from our current methods of doing business to the digital platforms that will drive future, more agile businesses. This week I cover the “The Digital Enterprise Shift”, a whitepaper written last year by Neil Ward-Dutton, co-founder and Research Director at MWD Advisors and a prominent member of the enterprise architecture community.
Continue readingMy last microservices post welcomed the opportunity to further the conversation about service oriented architectures, because frankly the SOA job isn’t done yet. But I didn’t actually talk about what microservices are. Here I write down a simple definition.
Continue readingMy last post on the Composable Enterprise gave an overview of Jonathan Murray’s manifesto. While this is leading edge stuff, it is by no means new. We’ve been aiming for composable architectures for many decades now, going back to DCE and CORBA and perhaps even earlier. This speaks to how difficult the challenge is and how our approaches change with lessons learned from previous attempts.
Continue readingMy colleague Yamen recently started the Sydney Microservices meetup group and the response was surprisingly strong with more than 86 people registered within 10 days. The first meetup on September 3 has 36 RSVPs. This is merely a local indication of the buzz that surrounds microservices at the moment.
Continue readingFifty-five percent of businesses are under threat from digital disruption. An MIT CISR Research Report that landed in my inbox this morning reports that out of a sample of 105 senior executives that attended a recent workshop on digital business models, 55% assess their business as being in the "red zone"—significant threat of digital disruption.
Continue readingBuilding distributed systems is our métier. One lesson we learned very early is the importance of visibility across all the elements in a system. But the more extended and loosely coupled your systems, the harder it is to achieve the visibility required. Loose coupling promotes availability and resilience but works against oversight and control. This is essentially a corollary of the CAP theorem. The challenge is very applicable to microservices as described by Benjamin Wootton in his article "Microservices - Not A Free Lunch!."
Continue readingIT goes through cycles—fat clients vs thin clients, centralised mainframes vs distributed computing. These tend to be areas where the costs and benefits of either end of the spectrum are difficult to discriminate between the alternatives. It takes time for the industry to settle on an equilibrium position, and quite often technology change shifts the equilibrium before it is reached.
Continue readingPerhaps the number one problem in enterprise IT is 'change'—how to handle it and how to keep up with a changing world. Gartner says that "IT organizations' application strategies often aren't dynamic enough to handle changes in technology."
Continue readingThere are two ways to look at integration: Integration is a cost: poorly planned system procurement and development means that we carry the technical burden of multiple applications with overlapping concerns. Data must be replicated between systems in order for them to function. The mechanisms we use to perform this replication are decided by individual projects and as a result we have a hotch-potch of hundreds of interfaces, in different languages, using different tools, realtime, batch and manual re-keying. Or, Integration is an opportunity: no single application does what we need to run our organization. No application is an island, so it behoves us to make integration a core competency. By externalising data, processes and events, by making those capabilities addressable from the outside, we can develop and maintain a platform that allows us to build our unique organizational capability on top of our choice of commodity or best of breed applications.
Continue readingDeeply ingrained in our philosophy at Deloitte Platform Engineering is the idea of building solutions by composing services to fit a unique business need. Nothing really new here, people have been talking about "mashups" about "service composition" and "composite applications" for a while and we've seen our customers derive great benefit from this approach. But what is really exciting is the way that cloud and software as a service (SaaS) really kicks this philosophy into high gear. The majority of our projects in the last two years have involved SaaS integration and that demand is accelerating.
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