| Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies. This month, we focus on "Intentional Architecture and Emergent Design". These core topics currently span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graph in this year's Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report. We see increasing adoption of continuous architecture, the architecture advice process, and emergent design. Key challenges remain in this space, including being conscious about how the design interacts with the implementation and ensuring all stakeholders are identified and involved with key architectural decisions. News Business Systems Integration Is about to Get a Whole Lot Easier In this recent InfoQ article, Doug Hudgeon explores a new breed of integration tools from companies such as Merge.dev, Codat.io, and Stedi.com. These integration tools have simplified data models for most common business data objects - suppliers, customers, employees, invoices, etc.- and have connectors that take data from many popular software packages and convert it to a simplified model. As an integrator, this makes your job easier because you don't need to learn the arcane idiosyncrasies of each system. You can focus on transforming data from one simplified format to another. Architectural Frameworks, Patterns, and Tactics Are No Substitute for Making Your Own Decisions In this InfoQ article, Pierre Pureur and Kurt Bittner argue that among the most important architectural decisions a team will make are the choices about the frameworks they will use, the patterns they will employ, and the architectural tactics they will use. Consideration of the benefits and limitations of each of these shapes the decisions the team makes and the resulting architecture of the system. When selecting a cloud option, it's important to understand that the level of abstraction that each one provides has a direct impact on the administration cost. Choosing the Right Cloud Infrastructure for Your SaaS Start-up In this article, Ratnesh Singh Parihar explores the architectural impact of "Choosing the Right Cloud Infrastructure for Your SaaS Start-up". He suggests considering the company's ability to manage the infrastructure, including day-to-day management, and how resilient the product is to future changes. It is critical to evaluate and decide how much control is required over the infrastructure. He argues that high-end dedicated instances will provide maximum control versus serverless, low-code, and no-code platforms, which offer the least amount of control. Building Workflows with AWS Step Functions Pratik Das explores using AWS Step Functions to build a wide variety of applications involving workflows like orchestrating microservices, automating IT and business processes, and building data and machine learning pipelines. He defines workflows in Step Functions with building blocks for configuring actions for integrating various AWS services, parallelizing more than one action, failure management, and setting up observability mechanisms. Das then uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL) in JSON format using a schema called Amazon States Language (ASL) for defining the workflows in Step Functions. Sponsored | | Over the last decade, Microsoft has evolved from a focus on Windows and .NET to a mindset that embraces open-source software and philosophy. Today, Microsoft employs thousands of people focused on Java across engineering, developer relations, and customer support. In this eBook, we’ll take a historical look at the ways in which Microsoft has adopted Java over the years, its recent investments in the language, and how various groups within Microsoft are using it internally.
Learn more about this topic in the eBook "How Microsoft Applies Java - The Inside Story", sponsored by Microsoft. |
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InfoQ Technology Adoption Survey 2022
We have a small favour to ask. The InfoQ team would like to better understand which technologies and software products are currently on your radar. Your responses will help us create more topically relevant and useful content for the InfoQ community. Complete the survey for a chance to win 1 of 5 complimentary all-access tickets to QCon Plus (Nov 29 - Dec 9) worth $599. Take the 3 minute survey. Case Study Chipping Away at the Monolith: Applying MVPs and MVAs to Legacy Applications Legacy applications are often stuck in the slow lane: aging and brittle, poorly understood and barely supported, and based on aging technologies. They are often the last applications to benefit from modern concepts like continuous delivery. Yet because of their potential instability, they are actually the applications that benefit most from concepts like a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and its related Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA). The concepts of MVP and MVA don't apply just to new applications; they provide a new and innovative way to look at scoping changes to legacy systems that prevents taking on too much change, too soon. In reality, every new application becomes a kind of "legacy application" after its first major release, and finding ways to limit the scope of change is important as applications evolve. The MVA approach can help an organization evaluate and amend its technology standards by showing how new technology is truly essential to supporting an MVP. It allows you to challenge technology standards with real data, rather than with just preferences and opinions. The process of creating an MVA can help a team to evaluate which parts of a legacy system need to be modernized now, and which parts can wait. Organizations have spent huge sums on failed "total rewrite" modernizations that were, in hindsight, unnecessary. Identifying what parts must be modernized now, and what parts can wait is useful, for it gives an organization a better understanding of their technical debt, while also providing them with a much-needed filter to prevent needless work. Legacy applications, because they are often mission-critical, need special focus on sustainability. In fact, the fear of making the legacy application unstable prevents many organizations from making important and needed incremental improvements to them, making them even more brittle and risk-laden. Focusing on sustainability QARs, including growing the skills that teams need to evolve the applications, helps to make the applications more resilient over time. Finally, it's useful to keep in mind that today's "legacy" applications were, in many cases, shiny and brand new not very many years ago. These aren't just applications written 40 years ago; they are also applications written just 10 years ago, or even more recently. As soon as an application is no longer being continuously updated, it starts to decay. Considering an MVA as a part of every new release helps to keep applications fresh. This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article written by by Pierre Pureur and Kurt Bittner, "Chipping Away at the Monolith: Applying MVPs and MVAs to Legacy Applications", part of the Continuous Architecture Series. Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ. Sponsored | | The value of serverless can be summed up in one word: "free." Free from managing infrastructure. Free to focus on shipping code. And with O’Reilly’s Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run, you'll see how freeing it is to build without babysitting servers.
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Upcoming events QCon: For practitioners, by practitioners
QCon San Francisco - October 24-28
A three-day conference (October 24-26) plus two days of workshops are available between October 27-28. You’ll get focused training from people who have mastered their skills and want to help you master yours. Book your conference and workshop tickets.
QCon Plus online - November 29 - December 9
Level-up with actionable takeaways from 100+ software domain leaders. Join virtually from wherever you are in the world for an immersive fully online learning experience. Pick a learning pace that works best for you across 2 weeks to 90 day. Save your spot with early bird tickets. Senior software developers rely on the InfoQ community to keep ahead of the adoption curve. One of the main reasons software architects and engineers tell us they keep coming back to InfoQ is because they trust the information provided and selected by their peers. We’ve been helping software development teams adopt new technologies and practices for over 15 years through InfoQ articles, news items, podcasts, tech talks, trends reports, and QCon software development conferences. We hope you find this newsletter useful. If not, you can unsubscribe using the link below. Forwarded email? Subscribe and get your own copy. | 
