Microsoft reference architecture for banking

I spent some time documenting myself about Microsoft offerings for banking industry and I came across MIRA-B.

What I found interesting about this paper is that it covers in a clear and concise manner the business architecture from the banking perspective - challenges and goals for the banking sector, as well as a current snapshot of the trending market forces.

One example of some other forces disrupting the market is Apple Pay.

Here's the link, enjoy :)

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/industry/financial-services/banking-and-capital-markets/reference-architecture/default.aspx#fbid=onVDsDrUuky

EA

Enterprise Architecture

I did some study on TOGAF framework for my Open Group TOGAF 9.1 Certification Exam.
With this occasion, I took some time to think about it and came up with some opinions and ideas. Some of these could be found below.

I think there are some challenges on implementing it within enterprises:

1.  The technique to trim it down to a specific enterprise as needed in order to be easy to use within the enterprise - this also pertains to the key people and processes - think of it as a custom tailoring of the TOGAF framework for the enterprise it you will.  All this would require a significant amount of experience from the person driving this effort.   One could say that the activity to understand the specific business organization (not only processes but people and relationships) and to tailor the framework accordingly is also an art.

2. Triggering these kinds of changes within enterprises will always be challenging. That is, change, support and trigger the transformations within the enterprises in order to establish the enterprise architecture capabilities.

3.  My opinion remains that - and this is not something I read during my study - one must tailor and apply the TOGAF framework in an agile way.  The enterprise architecture capability and its processes should be designed with agility in mind, even for large enterprises.   Creating large amount of documentation, difficult to read and understand - much less to apply, as well as having complicated and time consuming architecture requirements management and governance processes is not going to help too much in this area.   I think that these enterprise capabilities should ensure that the IT supporting the enterprises is aligned to the business vision and requirements - but they need to do so in an agile way.

So, is TOGAF useful?  I think very much so.  But in the end it's just a framework with a vision - the real challenge will rest on the shoulders of people that are going to apply it - as always, an idea (strategy) however great remains an idea if you do not have the right people to understand it and execute on it ;)

Have fun

Architecture definition

While reading some materials a few days ago, I ran over a cool definition of IT architecture, and I thought about sharing it with you.  This is because in the past I encountered (and witnessed) difficulties while attempting to define it in a clear, concise manner.  So here it goes:

Architecture

1. A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation

2. The structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time

Have fun :)

IBM DB2 Replication

We recently had an architectural situation/problem to sove and that was to find a way to replicate Databases belonging to different system components between themselves, and more, to replicate all this data to an ODS belonging to our system DWH.

So I have been involved lately with looking at how we can set up a replication between different database instances we have in our solution.  A strong candidate, given our requirements was DB2 SQL Replication.

We found out that DB2 10.5 has strong capabilities in this regard.  One could set up a two way replication between two different database instances installed on two physically separate machines, even with connection limitations in place - I.e. One instance can not connect to the other.  Furthermore, the two way replication can even be configured on the same table, with filtering in place.  This means that for instance, rows matching a certain filtering criteria can be replicated from the instance A to instance B, while rows matching a different criteria can be replicated from instance B to instance A, and all of this happens with the same database table.

The connection limitation can be overcome by configuring the replication agent - that means to have these agents run on the machines that can physically connect to the other machines belonging to the system in question.

The DB2 SQL Replication can work almost instantaneously, replicating the data within a second or two timeframe.

IBM Power Hardware

Hi again :)

I am currently doing architecture related work on a solution that is based on IBM Power hardware and IBM software.

In order to shed some light on the situation, I was thinking to post a few lines on the advantages/disadvantages of IBM Power based hardware versus x86 hardware in general.

There are only three processors left in the market for mission-critical applications. The Intel x86 processor dominates mid-range and small servers, desktops, laptops and notebooks. The IBM mainframe zEC12 processor still dominates extreme workloads for data processing. And the IBM Power processor, which has taken over Unix workloads previously dominated by Sun, HP and other fallen Unix leaders.

For the general market, small business and departmental applications, the choice boils down to Intel x86 or Power.

Comparing the two using enterprise workloads will demonstrate a significant advantage for Power in data workloads such as databases, data warehouses, data transaction processing, data encryption/compression, and certainly in high-performance computing, which most in business think of as analytics.

The IBM Power hardware has an open architecture, while employing RISC based processors.  With Capacity on Demand, Hot-Node Add and Active Memory Expansion—Power Systems enterprise servers ensure you can keep your most important applications available, even as you add capacity to handle new business demands.  Power Systems are also optimized with the ability to securely run multiple applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems on a single server—so you can manage fewer systems with lower cost and higher utilization.

They are made for running Cloud workloads - the ideal Cloud infrastructure.  A couple of the most advantages delivered by Power systems:
- Exceptional reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) – and performance. In Power Systems mid-range and high-end systems, we see mean time between failures in the range of 70 to 100 years. This equates to 99.997 percent availability. Power Systems also have features to help manage virtual machine availability and elasticity such as Live Partition Mobility and dynamic resource allocation.
- Leadership virtualization. Power Systems with PowerVM have one of the industries most resilient and flexible hypervisors, supporting virtual machines (VMs) running in as small as one-twentieth of a core or up to 256 cores. PowerVM provides exceptional VM isolation. With the statistical multiplexing on the high-end systems, Power is optimized to run a large number of workloads per server with system utilization in the 70 to 80 percent range.

So what kind of clients are they aimed to?   The power systems are aimed at large enterprises, with stringent needs for reliability, uptime, processing and others.  Although in recent past, they have been also aimed to midsize clients.

In conclusion one could say that while the IBM Power systems are significantly more expensive than x86 based hardware, in the long run, the operational cost savings, as well as superior reliability, serviceability and reliability make them a great choice for enterprises.

Celebrating Bluemix 

As you might know, Bluemix is the new PaaS offering from IBM, due for release in the beginning of July 2014.  It builds on Cloud Foundry Open Source PaaS from Pivotal, and also adds a plethora of new services (mostly IBM software, but also community and third party based), DevOps integration, Web interfaces and support for other Software Defined Environment offerings such as Softlayer.

During the last couple of weeks, I helped organize a Bluemix event at IBM, where together with a couple of other colleagues we held presentations and organized a JAM event with prizes.   We had management support, and managed to secure substantial prizes of around $2000 in value.

We were happy to see that this event sparkled interest and enthusiasm among the participants, and that even if organizing such events seemed hard at the beginning, the feeling that we had afterwards was more than worth the effort.

We plan to hold additional cloud based meetups in the future, touching specific cloud areas such as Big Data, Internet of Things, Mobile and others.

With this occasion, I held a presentation on the business objectives and gains that the new IBM PaaS offering brings on the time to value and cost reductions areas.

I also briefly touched on the "Composable Business" "Holy Graal" objective that the IT strives to attain in order to support the businesses in their course changes - so that they adapt to the market conditions.

Currently, the IT departments are taking months/years to build and provision applications aimed at supporting the new business objectives.  This of course results in rather large time to value and costs for the businesses themselves.  While this is not necessarily bad, it can certainly be improved.   There were also attempts to improve these operational parameters in the past - with switches from Waterfall development styles/processes to more agile ones.  Significant gains have been experienced.   However, this could be further improved through employing new tooling and approaches that would help IT even further bridge the gap to time to value and cost reductions the businesses seek.

The new PaaS offering from IBM is supposed to enable the "API Economy" - so that building new services, applications and reusing the existing ones is going to be very easy.  Interconnecting with Cloud APIs residing on other clouds, integrations with legacy applications and services residing on legacy enterprise environments - all should become straightforward.

As the developers, companies, ISVs are going to construct these building blocks, the ITs will be able to leverage them in order to "stitch together" mobile, and cloud applications in record times - therefore making use of the "composable business" pieces.   The time to value and costs will go down even more, and IT will be able to support the business direction changes quicky - enabling them to cash in on the market trends with much more agility.

I foresee that in the coming years the PaaS offerings from ISVs - including IBM - will mature, and that this DevOps in Cloud model will extend even more.  By then, the composable services will grow in size and number, enabling the API Economy and effectively allowing IT departments to use the "composable business" approach when developing new features and applications.

RUP based processes and technical solution proposals

Hello :)

I decided today - since I have a little time - to write about the importance of following well defined and established processes when defining technical solutions for the clients.

Coincidentally, I have been involved recently in give back activities to the Architecture Profession within the company I work for.  In essence, it is a program where a selected group of people act as SME/Chief Architects for the participants (the assigned Solution Architects responsible for technical solution creation), guiding them through the process of delivering an architectural solution to a given client problem.  The purpose of the program is to help the participants gain real world experience through means of applying the theoretical knowledge they gained while following Architecture courses, thus acquiring the skill set required to successfully deliver architectural solutions on their own.

In short - since this kind of work takes place internally at my company therefore I won't give a lot of details - they need to do the selection of a delivery process from the RUP based framework we have in place, customize it based on the project conditions (and create work breakdown structure) , and then proceed to follow it by creating the artifacts that describe the solution.  All this effort would take place under our supervision as Chief Architects.

This exercise described above, reminded me of the importance of following these delivery processes while creating the technical solutions proposals for the clients.

For instance, we would need to organize ourselves and decide to follow the TSD delivery processes while working on the technical solution proposals; employ AD 2.0 for example while executing the projects, once the contract is secured; and do TDAs each step of the way (for technical solution proposal, as well as for the delivery part).

Of course, in order to be able to achieve all that we would need structural organizational changes to support these activities within our center, we would have to train architects, teach the method, employ technical solution managers.

But the flip side of all that is that we would gain the ability at an organizational level be able to respond to these kind of opportunities in a much coherent way, and therefore increase our changes as an organization to win new contracts - and equally important, deliver them successfully.