Writing code

I will discuss in the following about bug and software development in general.  

I was reading an article about what a good programmer is.  The article contained a few good points, clearly matched by my previous experience.  While I may not necessarily agree with the rest of the points, I found the ones below of significance. 

"This is also about how we define quality and what a bug is.  If we look at a traditional and very "intuitive" definition of a bug, it is something that causes our software to produce an incorrect or unexpected result. However, if we think more about how the software is actually used and by whom, we'll see that there are many other types of bugs, including scalability, reliability, and even maintainability ones."

"If we put all those "-ilities" in a list and prioritize them by their severity and importance to the business, we'll see that functionality-related bugs are rather far from the top. I would actually put maintainability at the top."

"My point is that mistakes are not all equal. If I'm writing a PDF report generated by a piece of Java code and my report misses the footer, that's one type of bug, and its fix will cost the business X dollars. On the other hand, if my PDF generation code is so difficult to modify that in order to change its format from A4 to US Letter we have to rewrite it from scratch, that's a completely different type of bug. Needless to say, its fixing will be many times more expensive."

"There are exceptions, of course, where the business prioritizes functionality above everything else, but such situations happen very rarely (if the business is smart)." - however, the technical architect also has a role here to try to make things happen by this rule).

Organization and Architecture

Learning something new every day :)

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

-- Melvyn Conway, 1967

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.