Skip to main content

ECSA 2022 Keynote: Software Architecture in the age of Cloud Computing

The presentation below was delivered as an industrial keynote at the 16th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) held in Prague on 19 – 23 September 2022. For more information please refer to the ECSA 2022 website.

Abstract

The age of cloud computing presents software architects with a unique set of opportunities as well as a unique set of challenges. Designing, building, and operating applications at cloud scale has changed the very nature of software architecture discipline to accommodate a much larger set of objectives and skills. Prior to the cloud era, software architecture was primarily about fulfilling functional requirements while maintaining code modularity and meeting a narrow set of non-functional requirements, such as performance. The cloud-era architect needs to accommodate not only functional requirements and customer-defined throughput and performance requirements, but also a large set of non-functional requirements related to cyber security, compliance, and most notably also the financial/cost characteristics, which at cloud scale can make or break a software-as-a-service company. The whole discipline of software architecture just became not only wider to accommodate all the above aspects, but also deeper as cloud-scale architecture spans all layers of software all the way down to operating system kernel tuning and in the case of private cloud also requires hardware know-how and hardware assembly design closely aligned with high-level application workload requirements to achieve reasonable performance and economics at cloud scale.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coasting Like a PRO

Roughly three months into driving 225xe, it seems about right time come back to revisit the initial impressions and see how the car fares in long-term usage. In this post, I want to focus on the 225xe driving modes of which the car offers aplenty. First, there are the three traditional BMW Driving Experience modes: COMFORT, SPORT, and ECO PRO, which come fitted on non-hybrid powertrains as well. Then there are the eDrive modes: AUTO eDrive, MAX eDrive, and SAVE BATTERY. To complicate this even further, moving the gear stick to the left at any time switches the automatic gearbox to the sports mode, so there are two gearbox modes: Drive and Sport/Manual which allows sequential gear shifts. So in theory, there are 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 combinations, in practice, some of the combinations are mutually exclusive, so it is not so extreme as it seems. What is apparent though is that BMW keeps adding new options while maintaining the legacy options as well without thinking about consolidation. This...
Post a Comment
Read more

Version 2.0 Syndrome - Why the Software Architecture Matters

"Guys you will never have a chance to build the version 2.0, you have to get it right from the get-go, or keep suffering from your mistakes for the lifetime of the product." - Jiri Karpeta, my boss at LCS International, used to say. It was back in 1995, and while LCS's bread and butter were Helios, an ERP for the SMB segment, we were busy building Noris - the future LCS's flagship ERP for larger enterprises. Of course, given the above philosophy, LCS was quite heavily invested in CASE tools to support our software design efforts. That's where I learned the first time that software modeling matters. But back to the original statement above that you "never get a chance to build the version 2.0" . It may sound too harsh, too fatalistic. Well, you may be right, there are always exceptions to the rule. While I don't have exact statistics at hand, my experience shows that the statement is more often correct than not. I have interviewed hundreds of softw...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Month of Active Touring

Putting my money where my mouth is, I took on the adventure of buying a plug-in hybrid. A few years back, I used to drive a car only for weekend getaways, so an SUV seemed to be a logical choice. At only fifteen thousand kilometers driven annually, the fuel economy was not a significant issue, the driving experience was the main thing. During the past few years with family and small kids, the car usage became more spread out throughout the week. With that said, I noticed we maintain two very distinct driving patterns: many short trips around Prague during the week to get kids to school and sports and then longer trips, roughly 100 miles each direction, during the weekends. With short distances and many cold starts due to the city driving on the workdays, the already poor fuel economy of an SUV deteriorated further. I realized when our car was up for renewal that it was almost as if we needed two different vehicles for two different use cases - an electric vehicle for city driving a...
Post a Comment
Read more