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).

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: Service-Oriented Architecture (afternoon session, May 18, 2011)

Notes by Jack Chen

Experimentation in the Use of Service Orientation in Resource-Constrained Environments
Soumya Simanta, Software Engineering Institute
Edwin Morris, Software Engineering Institute
Daniel Plakosh, Software Engineering Institute
Joe Seibel, Software Engineering Institute
Bill Anderson, Software Engineering Institute

Abstract and presentation slides

Building a situational-awareness application

• real-time data transfer
• mobile, in the field (Android)

Tactical environment; “last mile” users, individual infantry trooper that requires situational awareness

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

SOA and Cloud Computing: Hot Topics at SATURN 2011

In celebration of the 7th year for the SATURN Conference, this year’s SATURN technical program is organized around “7 things you need to know about the next 7 years in architecture.” One of the themes we will explore at SATURN 2011 is service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. We have invited leading practitioners and industry experts to discuss their ideas and experiences on SOA and cloud computing.

Highlights include the following:

SATURN 2011 Theme Leader to Present SEI Webinar: Emerging Technologies for Software-Reliant Systems

(The archived version of this webinar can now be viewed here.)

On Thursday, February 24 from 1:30 to 2:30 PM EST, Grace Lewis of the SEI will present a free SEI webinar, titled “Emerging Technologies for Software-Reliant Systems.”

Register.

Lewis is one of seven theme leaders for SATURN 2011, which will be held on May 16-20 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California. She recently wrote a blog post about SOA and cloud computing, the theme that she is leading for SATURN 2011. This webinar and others are our way of introducing readers to the themes that will be covered at SATURN 2011. Registration for SATURN is now open.

About the Webinar

Software-reliant systems of systems (SoS) now tend to be highly distributed software systems, formed from constituent software systems that are operated and managed by different organizations.

SATURN 2011 Theme: SOA and Cloud Computing (Grace Lewis)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing to me are interesting topics from an architecture perspective.

SOA has the misfortune of having a name that has the architecture word in it. This was exploited by multiple vendors who would sell “a SOA” as a stack of infrastructure products, leading to a common misconception that SOA would provide the complete architecture for a system.

Architecture and SOA Governance

Grace Lewis, senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, is leader for the SOA and Cloud Computing theme at SATURN 2011, which will be held May 16-20 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California.

We often say that architecture should be prescriptive and not descriptive. However, enforcing architecture is not an easy task, which is why people are starting to talk about architecture governance as a way to be prescriptive about architecture.

On a related note, even though service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style for designing and developing distributed systems, it is interesting that SOA governance often exists in organizations separate from architecture governance or is the only type of specialized IT governance.

I believe there is a two-way relationship between architecture and SOA governance that can be exploited for mutual benefit:

• SOA governance as a way to enforce SOA architectural principles and conformance of software implementation to software architecture
• Software architecture as an enabler of  SOA governance