Useful patterns to consider when designing distributed systems to handle events — This is the second of three instalments of my series on event-driven architectures and reactive systems. Here are part one and part three. Event-driven systems are experiencing a resurgence in interest with the rise of microservices. According to Wikipedia, Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a software architecture paradigm promoting the production…

How to increase chances of success and avoid common pitfalls — This is the last of three instalments of my series on event-driven architectures and reactive systems. Here are part one and part two. Event-driven architecture (EDA) is experiencing a resurgence in interest with the rise of microservices. According to Wikipedia, Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a software architecture paradigm promoting the…

EAI in the age of Agile and DevOps — The industry is heading for a fully cloud-native architecture where everything can be elastically scaled out/in and gracefully removed and redeployed, whenever needed to deal with unpredictable spikes in the workload and inevitable failures, even the catastrophic ones. All this whilst avoiding unnecessary costs due to a number of underused…

How events have been, and are being, used to build more robust systems — This is the first of three installments of my series on event-driven architectures and reactive systems. Here are part two and part three. Events have been used to integrate applications and build distributed systems since the late 80s and more notably from the 90s on with the help of Message-oriented…

What are the differences between Sequential, Parallel and Distributed Computing — Kenbak-1 was the first personal computer launched in 1971 before even microprocessors were available! It was an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory running at 1 MHz. Internally, it had a serial computer architecture, processing one bit at a time.[1]

Which one should I choose to run my microservices on? — We all know that microservices are distributed processes that must be independently releasable, deployable and scalable. At first glance Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) a.k.a. Serverless seem to be capable of bringing into the world the previous description. …

A tale of delivering value to end users quickly, reliably and sustainably Microservices is the architectural pattern that enables other modern IT trends, namely Agile, DevOps, and Cloud, to deliver real value. What’s the point of creating a number of small (two-pizzas size) teams if they cannot actually work independently…

The benefits offered by the Microservice chassis pattern — The microservice architecture enables rapid, frequent and reliable releases of large, complex applications. It also makes it easier for an organisation to keep evolving its technology stack. There are many good reasons to use microservices, but also drawbacks. Their benefits come with the added complexity of distributed systems[1]. When creating…

How different cloud-native software is from traditional web applications — The cloud computing models are firmly established as the new normal for enterprise IT. Every company, if it hasn’t already started, is thinking of moving workloads to the cloud. However, just lifting and shifting monoliths to run on some cloud service provider will not reap the full benefits of this…