Technology Thoughts

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, ...

The recent boom in big data processing and democratization of the big data space has been enabled by the fact that most of the concepts originated in the research labs of companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Facebook are now available as open source. Technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra let businesses around the world to become more data driven and tap into their massive data feeds to mine valuable insights. At the same time, we are still at a certain stage of the maturity curve of these new big data technologies and of the entire big data technology stack. Many of the technologies originated from a particular use case and attempts to apply them in a more generic fashion are hitting the limits of their technological foundations. In some areas, there are several competing technologies for the same set of use cases, which increases risks and costs of big data implementations. We will show how GoodData solves the entire big data pipeline today, starting from raw data feeds al...

Back in 2007 Marc Andreessen , founder of Netscape Communications and an investor in GoodData , wrote his legendary blog post entitled “ The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet ”. He defined the following three levels of a platform as follows: Level 1 - “Access API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services – this is how Flickr does it.” Level 2 - “Plug-In API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API – this is how Facebook does it.” Level 3 - “Runtime Environment”: “platform’s apps run inside the platform itself – the platform provides the “runtime environment” within which the app’s code runs.” In the same year, GoodData was founded by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek to take on the calcified world of Business Intelligence (BI). Unlike other BI vendors, we chose a radically different approach. We did not try to build yet an...

"Our thinking behind the StartupYard partnership was this: if you want to innovate in the BI space, why try to replicate what GoodData has already done in the past six years? Why not focus on your core competency and let GoodData to take care of the rest? Amazon Web Services (AWS) has spurred innovation by lowering the barrier to entry for new software startups as new companies no longer need to buy hardware and run their own datacenter. In a similar fashion, GoodData is changing the domain of BI. If you want to innovate in the Data and Analytics space in 2014, there is no need to start from scratch." - See more at: http://www.gooddata.com/blog/gooddata-platform-turbocharging-european-startups/

Cloud computing is accelerating the pace of migration from on-premise behind-the-firewall software deployment to Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription based delivery model. While accelerated innovation cycle and reduced time to value enabled by the above paradigm shift are well recognized due to their direct business impact, it is often overlooked how the new delivery model is affecting software engineering itself in terms of tools, processes as well as of its theoretical arsenal needed to develop cloud applications. Updated GoodData platform statistics as of Q2 2013! Software Engineering in the Age of SaaS and Cloud Computing - SERA 2013 - MFF UK - August 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

On Tuesday April 12, coincidentally on the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight, GoodData have launched Release 50 featuring GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce . I took this special opportunity to look back and recap the journey from the " R1 " as we call it internally to the latest " R50 ". Continue reading GoodData turned 50 in just 32 months! on our developer blog .

If you had asked me five or even three years ago what I thought of IT, I would probably replied that I had enough of IT for the rest of my life. Computers were fun in 90's when I was a student , but after the year 2000, with the increasing industrialization and maturity of the IT industry, things were starting to become boring for me. IT was no longer that exciting mix of science and art. This was especially the case of the enterprise IT as low cost country outsourcing turned the software development and enterprise integration into a full blown industrial process with lack of creativity: Armies of anonymous software engineers implementing endless customizations of a questionable business value, all this driven by multi-month waterfall projects and roll outs. Well, I exaggerate here a bit, I agree. ;-) It was the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) which changed the rules of the game. By running a single multi-tenant instance of a service on top of a hardware and software stack of ...