SATURN 2013, Minneapolis MN April 29-May 3: Call for Submissions

In 2013, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) software architecture onference will celebrate its 9th year. Each year SATURN attracts an international audience of practicing software architects, industry thought leaders, developers, technical managers, and researchers to share ideas, insights, and experience about effective architecture-centric practices for developing and maintaining software-intensive systems.

SEI Podcast Series: Cloud Computing for the Battlefield

Soldiers can use handheld mobile computing devices (smartphones) to help with various tasks, such as speech and image recognition, natural-language processing, decision making and mission planning. There are challenges to achieving these capabilities such as unreliable networks and bandwidth, lack of computational power, and the toll that computation-intensive tasks take on battery power. In this podcast at the SEI website, Grace Lewis of the SEI discusses research that she is leading to overcome these challenges by using cloudlets, which are localized, lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines on which soldiers can offload expensive computations from their handheld mobile devices, thereby providing greater processing capacity and helping conserve battery power.

Something for Everyone at SATURN 2012

Whether you are an aspiring software architect or an experienced practitioner, the SATURN 2012 Conference offers courses, presentations, tutorials, and talks tailored to your level of knowledge and experience.

Relative newcomers to architecture-centric engineering and development can take the introductory course in the SEI Software Architecture Curriculum, Software Architecture: Principles and Practices (SAPP) on Monday and Tuesday, May 7-8 at a discounted price. This popular course, offered each year at SATURN and taught this year by Rob Wojcik of the SEI, introduces participants to the essentials of software architecture. Also offered at SATURN this year is a half-day tutorial on Tuesday, May 8 by Peter Eeles of IBM Rational titled Software Architect 101. This tutorial (T1) provides attendees with a solid grounding in all aspects of software architecture and a framework on which they can build a deeper understanding of the role of the architect. Other Tuesday tutorials cover effective stakeholder collaboration (T2), integration of software architecture-centric methods into object-oriented analysis and design (T3), and architectural implications of cloud computing (T4).

SATURN 2012 Tutorial Highlights (Olaf Zimmermann)

The SEI has asked me to blog about some of the highlights of the tutorial program at SATURN 2012. Well, since I am the tutorial chair for this year’s conference, all eight tutorials are highlights to me of course; I sincerely hope that you will have a chance to attend at least some of them and will come to the same conclusion. 

Our selection of eight tutorials ties in with this year’s conference theme–Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration. For instance, you will have the chance to learn how to interact with business stakeholders, developers, and operations staff more successfully, how to elicit architecturally significant requirements rapidly, and how to enforce and evaluate your architectures effectively.

SATURN 2012 Registration Now Open

Registration is now open for the eighth annual SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) 2012 Conference. Register by April 9 to take advantage of early-bird savings, which include $250 off the regular full-conference rate.

SATURN 2012 will be held May 7-11, 2012 in St. Petersburg, Florida  at the St. Petersburg Bayfront Hilton hotel. The conference is presented in collaboration with IEEE Software magazine.

Architecture: Catalyst for Collaboration

The SATURN 2012 program includes more than 25 technical sessions, tutorials, courses, panel discussions, and keynote addresses that will explore how effective collaboration across geographical, cultural, and technical boundaries is increasingly prevalent and essential to system success. You will leave the SATURN 2012 conference with new ideas and solutions to implement in your organization. You will also have the opportunity to

• Share ideas and hear case studies on hot topics including cloud computing; software architecture for ultra-large-scale systems; certification, culture, and process; architecture evaluation and review; enterprise architecture; and the interaction of architecture and Agile development
• Take the first public offering of a new course from the SEI, the Advanced Software Architecture Workshop
• Learn from and interact with industry leaders (including keynote speakers Michael Stal and Andy Hunt), researchers, and senior members of the SEI staff

To register and review rates, visit the SATURN 2012 website. We hope to see you in Florida!

Cloud Computing for the Battlefield

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is increasingly interested in having soldiers carry handheld mobile computing devices to support their mission needs. Soldiers can use handheld devices to help with various tasks, such as speech and image recognition, natural-language processing, decision making, and mission planning. Three challenges, however, present obstacles to achieving these capabilities.

1. Mobile devices offer less computational power than a conventional desktop or server computer.
2. Computation-intensive tasks, such as image recognition or use of a global positioning system (GPS), take a heavy toll on battery power.
3. Networks and bandwidth are unreliable.

This post at the SEI Blog by Grace Lewis explores SEI research in overcoming these challenges by using cloudlets. Cloudlets are localized, lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines (VMs) on which soldiers can offload expensive computations from their handheld mobile devices, thereby providing greater processing capacity and helping conserve battery power.

The Amazon EC2 outage

I have recently been educating myself about the cloud and infrastructure as a service (IAAS). One of the issues that came up in my reading is the outage that Amazon EC2  suffered on April 21. There seem to be two schools of thought about this outage:

1. This goes to show that you can’t trust the cloud to be 100% reliable.
2. Of course the cloud is not 100% reliable and the prudent thing for an engineer to do is to assume that it will fail and to architect your system so that it is resilient to failure.

I have been convinced by the second argument mainly because I have been reading the Netflix tech blog. In one post, they describe why Netflix  customers were unaffected by the Amazon outage even though Netflix has moved almost all of its operations onto EC2. It comes down to, in the words of one commentator, whether 99.95% availability should be read as saying that an outage is an extremely rare occurrence or whether it should be read as a guarantee that EC2 will be unavailable .05% of the time. Netflix took the second interpretation and architected their cloud usage to survive the outage.

- Len Bass, SEI

Free SEI Webinar 6/23: Service-Oriented Architecture: A Quality Attribute Perspective

On Thursday, June 23 from 1:30 to 2:30 Eastern time, Grace Lewis of the SEI will present a free SEI webinar, titled “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Quality Attribute Perspective.”

Register.

About the Webinar

Service orientation is an approach to software systems development that has become a popular way to implement distributed, loosely coupled systems, because it offers such features as standardization, platform independence, well-defined interfaces, and tool support that enables legacy-system integration. From a quality attribute point of view, the primary drivers for service-orientation adoption are interoperability and modifiability. However, a common misconception is that an architecture that uses a service-oriented approach can achieve these qualities by simply putting together a set of vendor products that provide an infrastructure and then using this infrastructure to expose a set of reusable services to build systems. In reality, there are many architectural decisions that need to be made. An architectural decision that promotes interoperability or modifiability can negatively impact other qualities, such as availability, reliability, security, and performance. This presentation will talk about  the effect that service orientation has on system quality attributes.

Guest Post: Architects Wanted in the Cloud: Thoughts on the SEI SATURN Conference Cloud and SOA Track

James Downey, PhD, a solution architect for Dell Services, blogs about cloud computing at http://CloudOfInnovation.com and contributes to @DellinTheClouds on Twitter. Also an active member of SDForum, James often writes for the SDForum newsletter on issues of interest to the software engineering community.

Will cloud computing make software architects obsolete? If cloud vendors take responsibility for quality attributes through SLAs, what work is left for architects? What decisions remain after the one big decision of moving to the cloud? Throughout the SOA and Cloud Computing track at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) SATURN conference held this past week near San Francisco, SEI researchers and industry practitioners made clear that by increasing design options, the cloud dramatically expands the role of the architect. In reality, the decision to go cloud is anything but binary.

SATURN 2011 Session: SOA and Cloud Computing (morning session, May 18, 2011)

Notes by Peter Foldes

Architectural Implications of Cloud Computing
Grace Lewis, SEI

Abstract

Agenda:

• Cloud computing concepts
• Architectural implications of cloud computing
• Final thoughts

What is cloud computing by Ian Foster: Large scale; distributed

Cloud computing types:
By capability

• SaaS
• PaaS
• IaaS

by who can access it

• Private
• Public