Tag Archives: Technology

Building Evolutionary Architectures

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology

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I have been working my way through Building Evolutionary Architectures by Neal Forward, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua. Three senior and respected members of Thoughtworks (also the home of Martin Fowler). Having read and listened to Neal and Rebecca’s presentations and writing I had expected a deeply thought provoking read, but have to admit to being disappointed. There are some good points without a doubt, but the book pretty much focuses on one idea, the application of fitness functions. But I’m not convinced it warrants several hundred pages of a book as result the point does at times feel laboured.

There are some arguments made, that leave me thinking that there is a view that the only answer is microservices in the conventional model of Kubernetes, Docker etc, which I agree is a powerful paradigm to allow solutions to evolve, but it isn’t a silver bullet and not always right in every case (if you have a team lacking the underlying appreciation of the goals, or put in to place in an ad-hoc manner (see Chris Richardson‘s work) it isn’t going to help.

Alongside this, there is little said about the interface definition for microservices (typically APIs of one form or another). Whilst mention of leaky abstractions is made, the material illustrations such as code lead API definitions are omitted (risk being, code changes, the API changes and the impact cascades).

What surprised me the most is the on more than one occasion the books points to ERPs not being sufficiently customisable. Yet, anyone working with ERPs will tell you that ERPs are at their best when you use them to leverage industry best practices rather than crow bar them to fit unconventional ways of operating. If you’re a manufacturer, is fiscal reporting part of your differentiator; probably not, so why not take best practice OOTB.

As usual I have mind mapped things as I read through the book.  The dynamic/interactive version is here, the image (but not in full detail) is below.

evolutionary architectures.png

 

Oracle Developer Meetup London – September 2018

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in APIs & microservices, Dev Meetup, General, Technology

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#OracleDevMeetup in London - GraphQL

Last night we ran the latest of the Oracle Developer Meetups in London. This time Luis Weir presented on GraphQL, which got an very engaged discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of GraphQL, in-depth points about how the error paths should be handled among many other things.

The presentation material Luis used is based upon his Devoxx session earlier this year and can be seen here:

The links to Luis’ examples can be found on his GitHub account – https://github.com/luisw19/graphql-samples

After a insightful and thought provoking presentation on GraphQL the Drones with APIs project had its latest update.  Providing a lot of laughter to the evening’s proceedings. Including demonstration of flying the drone using REST APIs published via a gateway and Go back-end.  This included the DroneDash presenting a visual presentation of the commands being issues via REST, as seen here:

All the code, API definitions and documentation for people to add or extend can be found in the meetup’s GITHub – https://github.com/oracledeveloperslondon/.

A few of the useful links used or mentioned last night are:

 

The next meetup is planned for Monday November 19th.  Topics  will be published soon.

 

#OracleDevMeetup in London - GraphQL

Oracle Code London – Presentation & Periscope Interview

31 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

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Whilst in London Wednesday to present Microservices in a Monolith World at the Oracle Code London,  I also participated in an interview streamed via Periscope.  The interview can be seen at https://www.pscp.tv/w/1jMKgqBrwYyJL 

Not only was this interview captured, my entire presentation is available on YouTube …

Understanding API Deployment State on API Platform

25 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in API Platform CS, APIs & microservices, development, General, Oracle, Technology

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The new Oracle API Platform makes it possible to deploy different versions of your APIs to different gateway instances. When you you’re managing the Development API Policies through all the different stages of the lifecycle (Design to Production) from a single management tier such a capability is essential. This is further challenged by the fact that each save of you API Definition creates a new iteration (the term used to identify each saved ‘version’ of the API)

However it does lead the challenge from a management perspective of knowing which iterations are running on each Gateway.. you can get the information from the current UI but it requires multiple steps to get the information. The UI also lends itself more to the design processes today than perhaps the more dense information views that a operational report might warrant.

I’m sure that over time these views will come, but today we can solve the problem by taking advantage of the fact that the product lives by its own ‘mission’ by offering a very rich set of APIs. As a result it becomes possible to actually build your own views. To that end I have written a Groovy script which will go through each API that can be seen and retrieves the iteration deployed to each logical gateway.

In terms of running the script you obviously need Groovy installed. It expects 3 parameters which are:

  • Server address e.g. https://1.2.3.4
  • Username e.g. weblogic
  • Password e.g. Welcome1

You can hardwire into the script default values which will then be used if no parameters are provided.

Here is a screenshot of some output.  I have masked out some information for reasons of security. But there should be enough here to give a sense of what is happening:

APIPlatformScript

The script includes suppressing certificate validation – necessary if you haven’t yet deployed your own specific certificate and still working with the default Oracle certificate.

Feel free to take the script and play with it. I make no claims to it’s elegance etc but I have tried to comment it so you can see what is going on. I have tried to keep the code fairly simple so you can see how it works and processes the JSON responses. The script is available at: https://github.com/mp3monster/Utils/blob/master/getDeployedIterations.groovy

For more about the APIs involved in the script, checkout

2017 into 2018 as a Geek

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by in General, Technology

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It seems that it becoming common for people to write a personal review of the year. If you’re old school Christmas Card sort then it gets printed and put in the card. If you’re a bit more hip then it’s a Facebook post. For those trendier than that, who knows?

Anyway, I thought I’d use my blog to reflect on what has happened and what we hope to be upto in 2018.

So the big headlines for us …

  • 1st book published as a co-author about ICS, started another book project which should be finished in 2018.Artwork-front
  • Packt have been talking to me about another book project (even though my contribution to book 2 not yet finished!) Have to admit what is being suggested is intriguing and a bit different
  • Then there was the UKOUG Journey to the Cloud event. Having been postponed because of venue flooding it was good to see this happen. Not to mention it being one of s number of events I have presented at this year.39178284831_45be4e943c_m
  • We attended and presented at the Oracle EMEA Partner Conference for the 1st time and presented with my co-author on ICS.
  • Contributions to supporting the UKOUG as part of a SIG committee member, reviewed for Oracle Scene. Being involved in a SIG committee also meant helping plan the conference.
  • Writing hasn’t just been about the books, we continue to write our own blog posts, content for Oracle-integration.cloud plus several journals including Oracle Technology Network,
  • Presenting at Oracle Open World for the 1st time, and signing copies of our book on ICS
  • Promoted from an Oracle Ace Associate to a full Oracle Ace.

So where will 2018 take us, well somethings we’re confident of …

What do we hope to pull off …

  • Another year presenting at Open World,
  • UKOUG Tech 18 presentations
  • Articles for Oracle Scene
  • Submissions accepted at Oracle Code London
  • Presenting at Oracle EMEA Partner Conference

Mindmaps Update

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in General, mindmap, Technology

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mindmap-4I have relocated my mindmaps to a new location – WiseMapping which presents the maps in a far more consumable manner than XMind. I’ve setup the links to now bounce through bitly so if things move again the links wont break. The maps available can be found using the following links:

Innovators

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Books, General

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Recently I’ve given some time over to catching up on some reading. Which has included Walter Isaacson’s tremendous book Innovators. I picked this up  more because I liked Walter’s approach to the Steve Job’s biography. I thought this was going to be more focused on individuals and how they brought through new technology innovations. But actually it is a very good potted history of the development of modern computing.  Whilst I work in IT and thought I knew key contributors, from Babbage, Lovelace to von Neumann and Turing.  I was rather surprised at how many signficiant contributors I didnt know, or only vaguely aware of.  For example the work of Douglas Engelbart who pretty much lead the design for the mouse.  What about Vint Cerf who made key contributions to TCP/IP? Stephen Crocker who was responsible for the RFC that we all associate with the IETF now?

Not only is the history interesting, the book looks at the dynamics of innovation and how much innovation comes from the individuals working away on their own and having a eureka moment compared to that constant dialogue between people which sounding off each other lead to new ideas? The later is beautifully illustrated with the development of the transistor and the work of John Baarden and Walter Brattain. It’s interesting that as the history moves into the pre-internet era that more and more of advancements are a result of collective effort, but also recognised as such. I wonder whether that is because technologies made collaboration easier, or the effects of socio-cultural developments that meant people recognised the collaborative efforts?

I’d recommend this book to anyone who is interested in IT has developed or even just interested in the interplay of personalities and events such as World war II that influenced scientific advancement.

Building Microservices

18 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Books, General, mindmap, Technology

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When I read a technical book from cover to cover I usually build a mind map so that I can use it as a memory jogger in the future if I need to return to get key points such as arguments or facts. With the ferstive break I have had time to finish reading Sam Newman’s Building Microservices. The following is a static image, but clicking on it can take you the dynamic site provided through WiseMapping, it does take a moment or two as the map is large (or click here).

microservices

Many of the points made in this excellent book are true to software design and development generally, but given a Microservices spin. For example, monitoring and security should be incorporated into any good design.

 

Thought Provoking Video

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

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So, I’m not a great fan of things like the World Economic Forum (WEF) – unlike TED it appears to be overtly political (and an opportunity for big business to lobby governments) rather than pure presentation ideas and innovation. That said, last week at Oracle’s Digital Transformation conference I did see a couple of videos produced by WEF that really got some messages across.