Divert the Flow

Yesterday Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis described the Critical Aggregator and how it can metastasize into an invasive form. When a legacy system has such an Invasive Critical Aggregator it's often best, if a little counter-intuitive, to Divert the Flow of data by building a new critical aggregator first. Once...

6d

Critical Aggregator

Business Leaders often need to make decisions that are influenced by a wide range of activity throughout the whole enterprise. To support this systems often have a what Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis call a Critical Aggregator: a component whose job is to visit various other systems and pull this information together....

1w

Two Phase Commit

Continuing his exploration of important patterns to maintain consistency across a cluster, Unmesh Joshi now looks at Two Phase Commit. It's broadly the most familiar approach, but comes with lots of complexities to make it work in practice over unreliable networks. more…

1w

Legacy Mimic: a new component that looks like an old one

Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis are also back with the New Year with a couple more articles from Patterns of Legacy Displacement in the funnel for the next couple of weeks. This one describes a Legacy Mimic: a part of the new system designed to make the old system think that nothing has changed. more…

2w

Replicated Log: synchronize multiple nodes with a write-ahead log

One of the core challenges in a distributed system is keeping the state synchronized across all the nodes, especially when neither the nodes, or the connections between them, are reliable. The core approach to handle with is a replicated log: using the write-ahead log pattern over the cluster. Unmesh Joshi shows how this...

3w

Paxos: using two consensus-building phases to handle unreliable nodes

Unmesh Joshi is ready to start the New Year with a few more of his Patterns of Distributed Systems. With this one he attempts the tricky task of explaining Paxos. This is a well-known protocol developed by Leslie Lamport, for nodes to reach a reliable consensus when both they, and the network, are prone to unexpected ...

3w

My favorite musical discoveries of 2021

I listen to a lot of interesting music, so picked out my six favorite new-to-me albums this year. I hope you find something interesting to groove to in there. more…

Dec 2021

How the advice process works in practice

Andrew finishes his article on how to scale software architecture by looking at how this technique works in practice, and also outlines how things can go wrong. more…

Dec 2021

Treat integration as strategic to your business

Brandon finishes his article on how we should look at integration by arguing that it is a strategic element of an enterprise's infrastructure. You can buy the best products in the world but "none of it will make you competitive in a digital world if you continue to treat integration as a tactical nuisance to overcome so you...

Dec 2021

A tech landscape and current climate sensing tool - Your own Tech Radar

Andrew's fourth supporting element for the Advice Process is using a tech radar to capture and map out your local version of the technology trends you see across your organization. more…

Dec 2021