SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) appears to be just another hype - after all we have been building distributed systems for quite a while now. But the real value of SOA is non-technical. In this episode Eberhard and Markus discuss the advantages and disadvantages, what SOA actually is and how it compares to other approaches that have been tried out before.

In this third Episode on software architecture, Michael and Markus talk about the basic tools that an architect uses when architecting systems. These tools include things like separation, abstraction, compression and sharing. We also relate these tools to the quality attributes we introduced in previous archtecture episodes.

In this, as well as in the next episode Eberhard and Markus continue their discussion about SOA (the episode got too long, so we had to split it into two ... SOA 2a and SOA 2b). In this episode, we talk about the various perspectives on SOA (CBD, EAI, BPM), about fundamental requirements towards an SOA, and we discuss the role of models in defining sustainable architectures. We also discuss how a programming model based on the described approach typically looks like. We then discuss a number of issues any large-scale SOA faces (and for which the SOA paradigm does not really provide an out-of-the-box solution: In this episode we discuss data type ownership and (weak) typing of data types.

This is the second snippet of the SOA 2 double-episode. Eberhard and Markus continue the discussion with the issue of service reuse and a couple of development process issues. We also look at the duality between infrastructure development and application development in the context of an SOA. We then discuss the great spaghetti misunderstanding :-). We conclude this episode with a look at how to integrate BPM into the conceptual SOA framework we've built up to now, and we'll also briefly skim over a number of technologies related to SOA. Note that this episode, as well as the last one, is based on a set of slides; these can be downloaded from here. This episode covers slides 39 through 74.

In this episode Markus and our Guest Andy Longshaw talk about enterprise architecture. More specifically, we talk about some of the patterns in Andy Longshaw's and Paul Dyson's book Architecting Enterprise Solutions: Patterns for High-Capability Internet-based Systems. These includes things like replication, load balancing, monitoring and application management.

This is the fourth and final episode on the fundamentals of Software Architecture. We talk mainly about architectural styles and patterns, as introduced in the POSA 1 Book. We also discuss a little bit the process of actually using those patterns for architecting systems.

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.

Enterprise Architecture is already common practice in most Fortune 100 companies. As the topic is comparably young, knowledge about it is not so widespread in the Software Architects Community, who deals mostly with project architectures. In this episode Alex speaks with Wolfgang Keller who has practical experience as an enterprise architect and has written a book on the topic. He is a Partner with BusinessGlue Consulting. They are specializing in the relationship between EAM and SOA. This episode gives a rough overview what Enterprise Architecture actually is touches the standards in the field and also gives hints on the practical work of Enterprise Architects.

In this episode we talk to Galen Hunt about the Singularity research OS. Galen is the head of Microsoft's OS Research Group and, together with a team of about 30 other researches, has built Singularity. We started our discussion by covering the basics of Singularity: why it was designed, what the goals of the project are as well as some of the architectural foundations of Singularity: software isolated processes, contract-based channels and manifest-based programs. In this context we also looked at the role of the Spec# and Sing# programming languages and the role of static analysis tools to statically verify important properties of a singularity application. We then looked a little bit more closely at the role of the kernel and how it is different from kernels in traditional OSes. In a second part of the discussion we looked at some of the experiments the group did based on the OS. These include compile-time reflection, using hardware protection domains, heterogenerous multiprocessing as well as the typed assembly language We closed the conversation with a look at some of the performance characteristics of Singularity, compatibility with traditional operating systems and a brief look at how the findings from Singularity influence product development at Microsoft.

In this episode, Markus talks to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on what she has learned from architecture reviews. This is a very complement to the earlier episode on architecture evaluation.

In this episode we talk with Klaus Marquardt about building systems out of plugins. After briefly introducing the concept of a plugin in contrast to modules and related software engineering concepts, we discuss different views on plugins and different ways of working with plugins for developing software. We are looking at plugins for embedded systems as well as large business systems, at how plugins change the working mode and team organization, and discuss the possibilities of why and when to use plugins for implementing software systems.

In this episode we discuss with Randy Shoup, Distinguished Architect at eBay, about architectural pinciples and patterns used for building the highly scalable eBay infrastructure. The discussion is structured into four main ideas: partition everything, use asynchrony everywhere, automate everything, and design the system keeping in mind that everything fails at some point in a large distributed system.

During Evolution of a software system, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the originally planned software architecture. Often an architectural degeneration happens because of various reasons during the development phases. In this session we will be looking how to avoid such architectural decay and degeneration and how continuous monitoring can improve the situation (and avoid architectural violations). In addition we will look at "refactoring in the large" and how refactoring can be simulated. A new family of "lint like tools for software architectures" is currently emerging in the marketplace I will show some examples and how they scale and support you in real world projects.

This is a discussion with Eoin Woods about his collection of top 10 software architecture mistakes. Looking at things that don't work is always a good way to learn what you should actually do.

This is another episode recorded at OOP 2009, thanks to SIGS Datacom and programme chair Frances Paulisch for making this possible. Here is the abstract from the conference program: Many software systems have fragile architectures that are based on brittle assumptions or rigid architectures that reduce options and make change difficult. On the one hand, an architecture needs to be fit for the present day, suitable for immediate use, and on the other it needs to accommodate the future, absorbing reasonable uncertainty. However, an approach that is overly focused on today's needs and nothing more can create an inflexible architecture. An approach that becomes obsessed with possible future changes creates an overly complex architecture that is unfit for both today's and tomorrow's needs. Both approaches encourage an early descent into legacy for a system. The considerations presented in this talk reflect an approach that is more about thinking in the continuous present tense than just the present or the future tense. This includes principles from lean thinking, practices common in agile processes and techniques for loosely coupled design.

In this episode we talk with Doug Simon from Sun Microsystems Laboratories about the Maxine Research VM, a so-called meta-circular virtual machine. Maxine is a JVM that is written itself in Java, but aims at taking JVM development to the next level while using highly integrated Java IDEs as development environments and running and debugging the VM itself directly from the Inspector, an IDE-like tool specialized for the Maxine VM. During the episode we talk about the basic ideas behind Maxine, what exactly "meta-circular" means and what makes it interesting and promising to build a Java VM in Java. We talk about the relationship to Sun's current production JVM (HotSpot) and about ideas and directions for the future of Maxine.

Dave explains why reading source code is at least as important a skill as writing source code. He shares approaches for how to get to grips with unknown and undocumented source code even if it is non-trivial in size. He finishes with advice for how to get started reading code.

This time we have John Wiegand on the mic for an episode on architectures and agile software development. We talk about the role of architectures in an agile world and why architectures change and need to change over time. We discuss the characteristics of those living architectures, using the Eclipse and the Jazz projects as examples, and the surrounding development methods for such environments.

In this episode, Robert talks with Nati Shalom about the emergence of large-system architectures consisting of a grid of high-memory nodes.

Recording Venue: Lucene Revolution 2012 (Boston) Guest: Grant Ingersoll Grant Ingersoll, a committer on the Apache Solr and Lucene, talks with Robert about the  problems of full-text search and why applications are taking control of their own search, and then continues with a dive into the architecture of the Solr search engine. The architecture portion of the […]

Micro services is an emerging trend in software architecture that focuses on small, lightweight applications as a means to avoid large, unmaintainable, monolithic systems. This approach allows for individual technology stacks for each component and more resilient systems. Micro services uses well-known communication schemes such as REST but also require new technologies for the implementation. […]

Gernot Starke talks about arc42: an open-source set of templates he developed to document software architecture based on his practical experience with real projects. Also Gernot and host Eberhard then discuss how documenting architecture fits into agile processes and how to find the right amount of documentation for a system. They walk through the different parts of the arc42 templates covering requirements and the context of the system and the solution structure, including building blocks, runtime, and deployment. They discuss tooling, versioning, testing documentation, and how to keep documentation up to date.

Fred George talks with Eberhard about "Developer Anarchy" - a manager-less development approach Fred has been using very successfully in different organizations - combined with microservices.

Mike Barker talks with Sven Johann about the architecture of the LMAX system. LMAX is a low-latency, high-throughput trading platform. Their discussion begins with what LMAX does; the origins of LMAX; and extreme performance requirements faced by LMAX. They then delve into systems that LMAX communicates with; LMAX users; the two main components of the system (broker and exchange); Mechanical Sympathy as an architectural driver; message flow using the Disruptor library; and lock-free algorithms. Mike and Sven wrap up by discussing how a well modeled domain model can improve the performance of any system; automated (performance) tests; continuous delivery; and measuring response times.

Neal Ford chats with Kim Carter about the required skills of a Software Architect, creating and maintain them, transition roles. The importance of history, developing soft skills, and dealing with losing technical skills.

Phillipp Krenn talks with SE Radio’s Jeff Meyerson about Elasticsearch, a scalable search index. The conversation begins with a discussion of search, how it compares to database queries, and what an inverted index is. Phillipp introduces Wikipedia as an example that runs throughout the episode because Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to power its full-text search. A discussion of Elasticsearch’s scalability ensues, including basic terminology and an explanation of other applications of Elasticsearch.

Bryan Reinero talks with Gregor Hohpe about IT Transformation, the process by which organizations adapt and reorganize themselves in response to evolution and how the Enterprise Architect leads that transformation.

Travis Kimmel and Kevin Goldsmith discuss the correspondence between organizational design and software architecture. Their conversation covers: what Conway’s Law is; Kevin’s experiences in different organizational structures (e.g., Avvo, Spotify, Adobe, and Microsoft) and how those structures influenced the software architecture; what the “Reverse Conway Maneuver” is and how organizations can leverage it; how organizations can evolve existing architectures.

Edaena Salinas talks with Stephen Ewen about streaming architecture. Stephen is one of the original creators of Apache Flink. Topics discussed: stream processing vs batch processing, architecture components of stream architectures, Apache Flink...

Jay Kreps, CEO of Confluent, talks with Robert Blumen about how an enterprise integration architecture organized around a Kafka event log simplifies integration and enables rich forms of data sharing. #podcast #seradio #ieeecs #ComputerSociety

Barry O’Reilly of Black Tulip Technology discusses Antifragile Architecture, an approach for designing systems that actually improve in the face of complexity and disorder.

Tim Sneath, product management for Flutter and Dart at Google discusses what Flutter is, why it was created, where Dart came from, what the different layers of Flutter are, why it is so popular and why it makes a developers life much easier.

Michael L. Perry discusses his recently published book, The Art of Immutable Architecture, distinguishing immutable architecture from other approaches and, using familiar examples such as git and blockchain, addresses some possible misunderstandings...

Randy Shoup of eBay discusses the evolution of eBay's tech stack. SE Radio host Jeremy Jung speaks with Shoup about eBay's origins as a single C++ class with an Oracle database, a five-year migration to multiple Java services, sharing a database...

Ryan Magee, postdoctoral scholar research associate at LIGO Laboratory – Caltech, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about how software is used by scientists in physics research. The episode begins with a discussion of gravitational waves...

Roberto Di Cosmo, Computer Science professor at University Paris Diderot and founder of the Software Heritage initiative, discusses how to protect against sudden loss from the collapse of a "free" source code repository provider, how to protect...

Ori Saporta, co-founder and Systems Architect at vFunction, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the role of the software architect. The episode begins with Ori’s thoughts on what is typically missed or overlooked regarding this role. The conversation then explores aspects of both hard and soft skills required of software architects. Other topics include the relationship of the software architect to other roles, to design and process, and to quality. The show concludes by addressing the importance of dependency management by software architects. Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Ipek Ozkaya, Principal Researcher and Technical Director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon, discusses generative AI for Software Architecture with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan. The episode delves into fundamental definitions of software architecture and explores use cases in which gen AI can enhance architecture activities. The conversation spans from straightforward to challenging scenarios and highlights examples of relevant tooling. The episode concludes with insights on verifying the correctness of output for software architecture prompts and future trends in this domain. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Stevie Caldwell, Senior Engineering Technical Lead at Fairwinds, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss zero-trust network reference architecture. The episode begins with high-level definitions of zero-trust architecture, zero-trust reference architecture, and the pillars of Zero Trust. Stevie describes four open-source implementations of the Zero Trust Reference Architecture: Emissary Ingress, Cert Manager, LinkerD, and the Policy Engine Polaris. Each component is explored to help clarify their roles in the Zero Trust journey. The episode concludes with a look at the future direction of Zero Trust Network Architecture.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

Nick Tune and Jean-Georges Perrin join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about their proposed approach to modernizing legacy systems. The episode starts with some high-level perspective to set context for the approach described in their book, Architecture Modernization (Manning, 2024). From there, the discussion turns to important details, including criteria for deciding which aspects to revisit; some of the activities, processes, and tools; and the importance of data engineering in modernization efforts. Nick and Jean-Georges describe how to successfully implement an architecture-modernization effort, and how to fit that work with the teams' other priorities. The episode finishes with some warnings about the typical risks associated with modernizing a legacy system, and suggestions on how to mitigate them.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

A photographer’s connections with eight Indigenous women have helped her come to terms with her own Native ancestry and colonial trauma.

Crowdsourcing Project Management Internship (SLC--virtual)

I wanted to tell you about a service I recently discovered called Glean.

Glean searches the web for educational videos (lessons) in math and science and then structures and organizes them (setting, pace, teaching style, grade level, etc.), tags them by educational standard and adds interactive tools, i.e. Q&A and practice exercises.

As you provide feedback, Glean selects the best video lessons for you based on your learning styles and preferences.

I found a great resource by Joyce Valenza on Never Ending Search that I wanted to share with you. In her post, Google search by usage rights, she demonstrates an easy way to find copyright-friendly images on Google Image Search.

First, enter your search term into Google Images and then click on Search Tools and then Usage Rights.

Many thanks to the men and women that produce and protect America's food supply!

Details of Film Education's schools preview screening of Cars 2 and Q&A with producer Denise Ream

Information on Film Education's screening of Arrietty and Q&A with voice artist Tom Holland