Architecture

How build & deployment shapes software architecture – WebPerfDays 2012

Posted on October 8, 2012November 12, 2017 by Matthew Skelton

It was a privilege to be part of the first WebPerfDays EU in London on 5th October 2012. Together with the folks from CCPGames, I facilitated a session on Continuous Delivery, opening the discussion with an overview of how build & deployment shapes software architecture at thetrainline.com:

The Continuous Delivery session prompted some excellent discussions around CD; there seems to be interest in setting up a London-based meetup, which I agreed to help coordinate.

Kudos to Steve Thair (@TheOpsMgr) and team for organizing such an excellent event.

Talk: How build and deployment should shape software architectures – IASA Ignite talks

Posted on September 11, 2012November 12, 2017 by Matthew Skelton

I gave an ignite talk* at IASA UK’s second ignite series, slightly cryptically entitled “Architecting the Impossible“. Having seen just how strongly build and deployment concerns can shape the software that we put into production, I spoke on How build and deployment should shape software architectures, ending with the slightly (and deliberately) controversial point that:

software architecture is a function of build and deployment concerns (for some systems)

The slides are on SlideShare and SpeakerDeck:

Thanks to the good folks at IASA, especially Matt Deacon, and Endava, who hosted the event in London.

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*(5 mins, 20 slides, 15 secs per slide, auto-forwarding)

Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code

Posted on June 19, 2012September 28, 2020 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Learning from ‘Working Effectively with Legacy Code’ by Michael C. Feathers

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is a classic software development text. Not only is it still completely relevant when working with code, seven years after it was published, but also the approaches it advocates at the source code level are becoming essential to apply at the component and system integration levels too as our software systems become more complicated and polyglot, and we learn to fully automate our deployments and treat our infrastructure as code.

Book cover: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

For an overview of the book itself, read my review of ‘Legacy Code’ on Amazon.co.uk. I describe the different sections and how each is useful in a particular context. The rest of this article will focus on other aspects of Legacy Code, particularly the ‘why’ of changing code, and the implications for Continuous Delivery, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment automation.

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Event-Sourced Architectures by Martin Thompson at QConLondon 2012

Posted on May 18, 2012May 18, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Software performance guru Martin Thompson (@mjpt777) gave an illuminating talk on event-sourced architectures, and why event-driven, state-machine designs are the way forward for complex, multi-path software systems (“Event Sourced Architectures and what we have forgotten about High-Availability”, [slides: 700KB PDF]).

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Fault tolerance, anomaly detection, and anticipation patterns by Jon Allspaw at QConLondon 2012

Posted on March 21, 2012May 15, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Jon Allspaw (@allspaw) from Etsy talked about the role that Anomaly Detection, Fault Tolerance and Anticipation play in producing highly scalable software systems (Fault tolerance, anomaly detection, and anticipation patterns, slides [PDF, 5MB]).

As head of technical operations at Etsy, whose web traffic is pretty substantial, Jon focused on resilience in software systems: what it is, and how to achieve it.

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