The Enterprise Architecture Blog

Another lesson by Sameer Paradkar

Reference architectures are standardized architectures that provide a frame of reference for a vertical domain or sector. Reference models or architectures provide a common vocabulary, reusable designs, and industry best practices. They are not solution architectures (i.e., they are not implemented directly) but used rather as a constraint for more concrete architectures. Typically, a reference architecture includes common architecture principles, patterns, building blocks, and standards.

A lesson from EA expert Sameer Paradkar

Enterprise applications are usually born as monoliths. This practice seems reasonable since the support is less demanding and the system works well from a limited scopes. Microservices take precedence, however, once a system grows too large and complex. A common practice is to break the monolith into small autonomous pieces, each deployed and sustained by an agile team while leaving the team collaboration issues behind.

André Christ shares his best practices

Life is better if IT processes become automated. When software and applications are leveraged to minimize manual labor and maximize efficiency, an atmospheric change occurs in enterprises—more smiles, an economy of compliments, children are reunited with their parents, etc.

The opposite is true, however, when sequences are built and deployed poorly. Bad automation causes a backlog of errors—ranging from technical to organizational—almost impossible to fix with architecture management alone.

Introduction

Internet, data, portable devices and business models of everything-as-a-service are driving the digital transformation globally. New companies are being built and old ones are being destroyed faster than ever before. In this age, one of the key determinant factors of the success of a company, newer and older alike, is:

1. How good the customer's experience of the product and the service is.
2. How quickly a company can respond to the rapidly changing customer demands.

Microservices Governance is a methodology or approach that establishes policies, standards, and best practices for the adoption of Microservices to enable an enterprise agile IT environment.

In the Microservices world, developers now have the freedom and capability to experiment with new languages, patterns, frameworks, data stores, and other innovative aspects of IT development. This can result in the operations team feeling a level of discomfort when confronting the new experimentations done by the developers. Various views exist in regard to Microservices architecture having no governance, or a thin governance compared to service-oriented architecture (SOA).

To meet the increasing expectations of business, today’s CIOs must make strategic decisions about their company’s IT architecture, and use the best-fit tools available to ensure innovation.

This blog post will outline the top supporting tools, infrastructure layers, and architectures for Microservices in 2018.

Microservices remains a hot topic in the tech world, at conferences, fire-side chats, and in boardrooms. Recurrent questions always arise: “What is the difference between Microservices and SOA? Are Microservices an evolution of SOA or something entirely different? SOA and Microservices occupy different territory. Microservices and SOA are similar in many respects, and very different in others.  

Microservices is a powerful term with a game-changing outcome. Early adopters of microservices have been catapulted to greatness – companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, eBay, and Netflix. Airbnb, Disney, Dropbox, GE, and Goldman Sachs have also seen development lead times cut by as much as 75% when using microservices.

And how it is powering the most innovative enterprises

The writing's on the wall - Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, are all trailblazers in microservice architecture. These three companies dominate continuous delivery, DevOps, and show first-hand what microservice architecture can propel an organization into greatness.

Logging in to a website is so easy: I enter my username and password and can use the site. That's it.

What seems so simple is actually simple if the site is based on a monolithic application. But what if a website is powered by multiple microservices? How do the microservices know that a user is who s/he claims to be, and how can this be handled efficiently? The use of JSON Web Tokens can provide a secure and high-performance solution here.