The growth of Kafka inside an organization sometimes follows the development of the broader Kafka ecosystem over its lifetime. The initial use case may be something conceptually simple, like mainframe offload or point-to-point integration, evoking the simple Large Pipe architectures of Kafka’s infancy. Then those newly populated streams of events present themselves as fertile grounds for real-time analytics, as stream processing applications grow up around them to perform analysis…

How much can you separate what you are building from how you are building it? This becomes an increasingly relevant question with IT moving from building systems to cultivating ecosystems. At the enterprise architecture level, one of the challenges nowadays is to decide which constraints to put in place to get a robust and evolvable landscape of interacting components, while at the same time it is important to minimize these constraints so that teams and units have some autonomy, and that the…

SOLID principles are well-known for designing object-oriented systems. But what if you are developing microservices? IDEALS, is yet another silly mnemonic acronym and are the core principles for microservice design. The acronym stands for: Interface segregation, Deployability, Event-driven, Availability over consistency, Low Coupling, and Single responsibility. We will relate these IDEALS to techniques, tools, technologies, and domain modeling principles we use today to develop modern…

Architecture work is all about trade-offs. We weigh security against ease of use, we balance availability with maintainability and contrast performance with reliability. But how do we evaluate the cost and benefits of change? As architecture is a means to an end, not an end in itself, architectural improvements have to be governed by sound reasoning, and more often than not that has to be based on numbers. Which in turn implies the need for good practices for the financial evaluation of…

Do you find yourself, or your team facing unsolvable problems? Problems that start to polarise and get decided by the people with the most rank? Or the majority vote decided and it resolves in a split in the team or in people feeling left out, or excluded? Perhaps you find yourself excluded from a team or company? Polarities cannot be solved, only managed. With polarity mapping we manage that polarity and go from either-or thinking to both-and thinking, and this way includes the entire team in…

Modern architectures (e.g. event-driven and reactive) will gain more traction as we build more complex systems, connect more distributed components and slice systems into smaller autonomous pieces. Unfortunately, many companies don’t update their business processes to reflect this. I’ll give an example and discuss the consequences, motivating you to advocate for a redesign of your business processes internally. Too much attention gravitates towards the technical side of reactive, without…

This talk will examine principles that assist with successfully evolving from a monolith to Microservices. Deciding what to decouple along with when and how to incrementally evolve a system are the main architectural challenges in this process. It is important to commit to "stop adding to the monolith" - all new code is added as microservices; the "Strangler Pattern". The new features are microservices, occasionally replacing part of the monolith. Also, when writing new microservices code, it is…

Over the history of software systems, the way we build such artifacts, the way we design them, the way we express them have evolved in seemingly disruptive ways. Even today, the pendulum swings between low ceremony agile methods to more rigid waterfall-ish ones; from big balls of mud to microservices and then back to big balls of microservices. In this talk, we'll examine the past, the present, and the future of software architecture: the role it plays in software systems, and the timeless…