Michael Platt's WebLog : Architecture

Events, Events Events!

Michael Platt — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:11:00 GMT

So looking through my calendar for the next couple of weeks I have a ton of presentations to give and events to attend. First of all tomorrow at 2pm BST I am giving my Integration and Interop presentation, latest version, as a webcast which should be interesting. I have given this presentation as a 2.5 hour session and a 30 min session and had too much both times so an hour webcast will be interesting.

Next on Wednesday we have an MVP day where I will be presenting the half hour version of the same thing and then on Thursday I will be going to the John Craddock AD day here at Reading which looks very interesting and will help to crisp up my thoughts around IdM and organizational mapping.

On Monday next week (the 11^th) I will be running a session on Architectural Failures at SPA 2005 in Bedfordshire. This is not a presentation but a tutorial / workshop format where I go through some examples and then the attendees add in their ideas. I have never done anything like this before so I am a bit nervous but I think I have some good examples so hopefully it will go well.

Then off on the airplane to Edinburgh (shame because I will miss some of SPA) for the first of the Technet Roadshows at the Corn Exchange on the 12^th and 13^th where I will be doing the Keynote on DSI and the one hour integration and interop talk on the 12^th followed by the keynote on Yukon on the 13^th.

Then on the 21st of April at Reading there is a half day session on Enterprise Library being run by one of the Patterns and Practices PM’s from Redmond. There will be both a customer session in the morning and a partner session in the afternoon. I haven’t been keeping up with what has been happening in the Patterns space recently and so this will be useful to get up to date with how the application blocks are getting pulled into a library.

Further out the next Architect Forum is on June 16^th in the Cavendish Center in London and will be on Connected Systems (Microsoft speak for SOA).

So it looks like an eventful (yuk!) couple of weeks!

Ivory Tower Architects

Michael Platt — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 08:28:00 GMT

I read this really interesting article about architects in the CIO magazine http://www.cio.com/archive/030105/blueprint.html I also had a long discussion with the CIO of a major investment bank in the city about his perception of architecture.

It is pretty clear that there is a feeling that architects sit in an ivory tower and come up with some sort of tablets of stone which then everyone ignores.

I think that this is the wrong model of architecture, an architect should look at what there is in an organization at present, try to come up with a model which makes sense of what is there and highlights the problem areas and then focuses on how to fix those problem areas going forward.

This is not an academic exercise, it is the essential element of getting an organization to work more effectively. If an architecture doesn’t help with this every day then it is the wrong architecture.

IT Practitioners Architecture Conference

Michael Platt — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 08:05:00 GMT

I noticed an interesting conference by The Open Group on architecture (the IT Practitioners Architecture Conference) on the 25-27^th April in Dublin. It says that they will be focusing on the role of the IT Architect and the IT Architecture as a profession which anyone who is sad enough to have been reading my Blog regularly will know is a topic of great interest to me.

Alas I will not be able to make it as I am running an Architecture forum on interop here in Reading on that date otherwise I would have gone.

Having said that and having had a look through the Agenda it didn’t look like there were a lot of sessions about architecture as a profession so maybe I wont be missing much. If anyone goes let me know if there was anything about setting up a profession discussed please?

Software Factories

Michael Platt — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 15:45:00 GMT

There is an interesting discussion with Steve Cook on software factories in this month’s DNJ online. I understood most of it, the bit I didn’t get was about how patterns are a modeless software factory. I have always been puzzled about the relationship between patterns, DSL’ and software factories and I’m afraid this did nothing to clarify things for me.

Security Architecture Discussions

Michael Platt — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:21:00 GMT

The day before yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to a Security discussion with some very senior security people in the UK. I introduced myself as an architect which led to some fairly “interesting” views of the role of the architect. There was clearly a lot of feeling that people starting off with an “architecture” base were pretty valueless in real life and people starting with a set of technologies / issues and refactoring an architecture from them were doing something useful. I hope I am in the latter camp.

It was clear to me that we do however need some sort of security architecture which has to include both the technical sort of stuff I blogged about earlier and also less security technology focussed areas such as:

Present and projected threat analysis / risk mitigation.

Security and auditability.

Alerting and patching.

There were also some interesting specific areas of interest that came up the discussion too such as:

Anti Virus / Malware strategies.

Mobile strategy.

Spoofing / phishing / farming strategies.

This last one seemed to me to be the most immediately pressing area which needed some innovative thinking. An addin to the client which did host change detection and warning seemed like a simple and effective solution to this.

Patterns and Practices Summit

Michael Platt — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:56:00 GMT

Keith Pleas et al are running another patterns and practises summit this year in both the US and in Oslo following on from the very successful events last year. They have very kindly asked me to keynote again however I am doing the UK technet Roadshow and the SPA 2005 event around then so I don’t want to take anything else on but it should be good and I like Oslo too so it’s a pity.

Interop Technet event post mortem

Michael Platt — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:45:00 GMT

So last Thursday I did my first Technet evening interop event based on Simon Guests Interop slides. It was a small and select audience and went reasonably well (I hardly ever feel things go very well). As always I was worried about not enough material and as always there was far too much. In fact it became a bit like a long reference manual or list so I was glad to have a couple of stories and a demo to break it up.

I used HIS 2005 to demo most of the different levels of interop as there are examples of network, security, database and application interoperability in HIS. I also got the whole demo to work which I was very pleased by, I will blogcast the other sections that I have not got to work in the past when I find my Microphone!

A couple of thoughts about the evening; firstly how big the whole area is, the present talk is pretty daunting in the amount of things it covers but it is far from complete. A full talk would be huge.

Secondly is how nice it is to give these talks as the audience tends to be more mature and so it is fun in the intervals to reminisce. In this case it was a gentleman who was still running VME on a Fujitsu machine so we had a chat about George 3!

Now I have to prepare for a DSI talk I am giving at the Architecture forum on Operations and Management tomorrow. I have managed to get an early demo of Indy to give so it should be interesting.

Organsational Mapping Technologies

Michael Platt — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:47:00 GMT

A month or so ago I blogged about an area of infrastructure architecture I feel is very important; mapping of organisations to infrastructure . The snag is that you have to understand a lot about both the organisation and the infrastructure support. Whilst there is not much I can do about the organisation structure I can understand how to use all our technologies to provide a better infrastructure support of organisational mapping so I very pleased that John Craddock is going to be going over these technologies in some detail at a Technet event here in the UK on Stretching Directory Boundaries, Cross Platform Identity Management, Authentication and Security. A must for my diary.

Microsoft to Buy Groove

Michael Platt — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:38:00 GMT

WOW! Microsoft are buying Groove:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/mar05/03-10GrooveQA.asp

and http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+buy+Groove+Networks/2100-1014_3-5608063.html?part=rss&tag=5606366&subj=news

I have used Groove in the past and was very impressed by the way it worked both as a Peer to Peer system and also as a offline / online engine. In fact it provided a wonderful basis for a whole new way of working that I was building a few years ago with just a couple of key elements missing.

Very interesting.

REST vs SOA or HTTP vs SOAP?

Michael Platt — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 18:08:00 GMT

There has been a huge amount of controversy over the whole REST vs SOA debate which seems to have settled down to the conclusion that REST is base for outside the firewall and SOA inside (whilst I realise this would be violently disputed by both camps it seems to be what is happening). I have to say I really struggle with the REST vs SOA debate. To me there are two arguments here: HTTP PUT / GET vs SOAP and REST vs SOA.

I am puzzled by the HTTP vs SOAP arguments because actually you can do much the same things with either mechanism; after all they are just messaging systems. HTTP is better in some areas that SOAP and vice versa.

I am puzzled also by the REST vs SOA arguments because, if you look at Fieldings original paper and don’t get bogged down in the SOAP stuff but look at the architectural level they seem to be to be saying much the same thing.

Actually I like both Fieldings paper at an architectural level and the whole of the SOA premise. I don’t really know enough about SOAP and HTTP formats to comment and I am not sure it’s terribly relevant anyway. I do like this paper though http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2002/07/20/restSoap.html .

Maybe I am just too thick to get the point of all this learned discourse.

Helicopters and Architects

Michael Platt — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 01:41:00 GMT

A funny story I have heard many times is that of a helicopter pilot who was lost in the fog. He saw an office block in the gloom and a person at the window. He shouted out “Where am I?” and the person in the office block shouted back “In a helicopter”. On hearing this the pilot immediately flew straight to the nearest airport and landed. The passengers turned to the pilot and asked “How did you know were we were from that answer?” The pilot replied “Well it was completely correct and utterly useless so I knew it was someone from a IT telephone support service and I know where they are located so could find the airport.”

I was reminded of this yesterday when I was asked to look into a customer support issue on security. I had a look at the initial issue and the response which was completely correct and accurate; indeed if anything was rather too voluminous. However it wasn’t what the customer was looking for and so the customer quite reasonably escalated the problem. In fact the problem wasn’t really a technical one (as so often is the case with security issues) but rather a physical one but of course the technical support person could only see the technical (and not very good) solutions.

So what has this got to do with architecture? It occurs to me that all too often the discussions people have don’t take account of the environment or model that other person is working with. Just like to a man with a hammer every answer involves hitting things to a programmer every answer involves programming. The trick is to understand the domain that the discussion and issues exist in and then work in that domain.

This is of course what architects do day in and out; understanding the level of abstraction that is being worked at and the resolving the issue at that level.

A few days ago someone pointed me to a book called “Blink” on this blog. I was sat at the airport last night (my second home.. seat 5A is my primary one J) and found the book on the bookstand so proceeded to read it (one of my few skills is I can read incredibly fast). The premise of the book is that you can analyse things very quickly and get to the correct answer very quickly by slicing the problem. The trick is to slice the problem at the right level and then get the right answer far more quickly and accurately than someone who tries to do a full analysis. I agree with this and feel that it is one of the key attributes of a “good” architect; the ability to asses a situation or problem at the correct level, just use the appropriate and relevant data at that level and get the answer very quickly.

I feel very fortunate that I am able to do this well; given my lack of many other skills it is very valuable in both my day to day and professional life. I wonder how it can be cultivated.

Data or entity Services

Michael Platt — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:50:00 GMT

One of the biggest problems I have with designing SOA systems is the area of data services or entity services as Microsoft calls them. The snag is that in many cases the data has to used by multiple services and so you really want to share the data between services which breaks autonomy.

Thinking about this I realized that data is used in services in two different ways: The first one is where it is just used by that service and so autonomy is not broken. The second is where the data is used by multiple services and so becomes a service entity where autonomy is broken.

In this case you need to think of the entity as more than just data but data and some associated logic such as validation and consistency checking for multiple services.

The way I think of this is the difference between a straight database and a database with stored procs. A straight database is used by a service, a database with stored procs is a data entity. Today the SP’s do data checking and validation for the data layer of a three tier architecture; in a entity service the code does entity checking and validation for the SOA.

Quite what the details of this entity checking and validation look like I am not sure but it will definitely include entity state validation and service rules checking…

Now autonomy is broken within the entity but not at the entity service level and so all is well with our services model once again. IMHO we must not break autonomy at the services level; this is a recipe for disaster. It is just architectural laziness.

Interoperability Architecture MS Product support

Michael Platt — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:59:00 GMT

Mapping the levels of the Interoperability architecture to MS products:

	HIS	SFU	SFN	SQLS	Win	NET	WS*	MIIS	MOM
Network	X	X	X		X
Directory		X	X		X			X
Security	X	X	X		X		X
File and Print	X	X	X		X
Clients	X				X
Platform	X	X	X		X
Data	X			X		X
CRM
Collaboration							X	X
Applications	X			X		X	X
TPM’s	X					X	X
Processes							X
Management							X		X

Interoperability Architecture

Michael Platt — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 21:56:00 GMT

The areas of infrastructure that we need to understand interoperability around are:

Network

1. Networks (Protocols, DNS / Bind, Wireless)

2. Directory (LDAP, AD, iplanet, NDS, edirectory)

3. Security (Standards, Kerberos, Certificates, SSO, IRM, Identity, WS-Sec, Federation)

Base

4. File and Print (Windows, NFS, Novell, LU0, VSAM)

5. Clients (Apple, Unix, Novell, Win 98, 3270, 5250, Mobile, Office, Browser)

6. Platform (Virtual Servers, Windows, UNIX, LINUX, Zos, AS400, SUN OS)

Packaged Solutions

7. Data (DB suppliers, Stored Procs, Data Access, Data Formats)

8. CRM (SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Great Plains, Reporting, BI)

9. Messaging and Collaboration (IM, Lotus, Groupwise, Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, Portals, Fax)

Custom Solutions

10. Applications (VB, Delphi, COM, NET, Java / JSP, C++, Cobol, WS)

11. TPM’s (ES, MTS, OSI/TP, Tuxedo, J2EE, CICS, IMS)

12. Process (MSMQ, MQSERIES, Tibco RV, Biztalk, Websphere)

Management and Operations Process

13. Deployment and Management (SNMP, WMI, MOM, SMS, Tivoli, CA, HP)

Infrastructure layers

Michael Platt — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:11:00 GMT

Following onfrom my blog yesterday I have collated all the feedback I got (Thanks!) and came up with these major levels and elements in the levels:

Hardware

1. Hardware (routers, servers, client devices, wireless, storage (SANS / NAS))

Network

2. Networks (Protocols, DNS / Bind, Wireless, VPN, VOIP, dynamic routing)

3. Directory (LDAP, AD, iplanet, NDS, edirectory).

4. Security (Physical, Standards, Kerberos, Certificates, IDS, Virus detection, SSO, IRM, Identity, IM, WS-Sec, Federation)

5. Firewalls (Proxy’s, IDS and firewalls)

Base

6. Web Servers (Apache, IIS)

7. File and Print (Windows, NFS, Novell, LU0)

8. Clients (Apple, Unix, Novell, Win 98, 3270, 5250, Mobile, Office, Browser)

9. Platform (Virtual Servers, Windows, UNIX, LINUX, Zos, AS400, SUN OS)

10. Fault Tolerance (High availability, Clustering, Load Balancing, Backup, Geoclusters)

Packaged Solutions

11. Data (DB types, DB suppliers, Stored Procs, Data Access, Data Formats, Data Transform)

12. CRM (SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Great Plains, Reporting, BI, Commerce Server)

13. Messaging and Collaboration (IM, Lotus, Groupwise, Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, SPS, STS, Portals, Fax)

Custom Solutions

14. Applications (VB, Delphi, COM, J2EE, NET, Java / JSP, C++, Cobol, WS)

15. Transactions (ES, MTS, OSI/TP, Tuxedo, J2EE, CICS, IMS)

16. Process (MSMQ, MQSERIES, Tibco RV, Biztalk, Websphere)

Management and Operations Process

17. Deployment and Management (SNMP, WMI, MOM, SMS, Tivoli, CA, HP)

18. Design, Planning and Operational processes (MSF, ITIL, MOF, COBIT, PM)

19. Frameworks (Zachmann, FEA, RM-ODP, TOGAF, BAIT)

Now I can use these to frame my interop presentation and ensure that all the levels are covered. Interestingly if you map products across these levels they tend to be a stake or stovepipe right through the levels.

For example HIS 2004 (SNA Server) provides support at levels 2,4,7,8,10,11,14,15,17 and 18 for a specific technology (mainframes)