Continuing my series on the Composable Enterprise I’m looking at how different thought-leaders and organizations perceive the shift from our current methods of doing business to the digital platforms that will drive future, more agile businesses. This week I cover the “The Digital Enterprise Shift”, a whitepaper...

My last microservices post welcomed the opportunity to further the conversation about service oriented architectures, because frankly the SOA job isn’t done yet. But I didn’t actually talk about what microservices are. Here I write down a simple definition.

Well, actually there isn’t one. Microservices are a little...

My last post on the Composable Enterprise gave an overview of Jonathan Murray’s manifesto. While this is leading edge stuff, it is by no means new. We’ve been aiming for composable architectures for many decades now, going back to DCE and CORBA and perhaps even earlier. This speaks to how difficult the challenge is...

My colleague Yamen recently started the Sydney Microservices meetup group and the response was surprisingly strong with more than 86 people registered within 10 days. The first meetup on September 3 has 36 RSVPs. This is merely a local indication of the buzz that surrounds microservices at the moment.

You may have...

Fifty-five percent of businesses are under threat from digital disruption. An MIT CISR Research Report that landed in my inbox this morning reports that out of a sample of 105 senior executives that attended a recent workshop on digital business models, 55% assess their business as being in the "red zone"—significant...

Building distributed systems is our métier. One lesson we learned very early is the importance of visibility across all the elements in a system. But the more extended and loosely coupled your systems, the harder it is to achieve the visibility required. Loose coupling promotes availability and resilience but works...

IT goes through cycles—fat clients vs thin clients, centralised mainframes vs distributed computing. These tend to be areas where the costs and benefits of either end of the spectrum are difficult to discriminate between the alternatives. It takes time for the industry to settle on an equilibrium position, and quite...

Perhaps the number one problem in enterprise IT is 'change'—how to handle it and how to keep up with a changing world. Gartner says that "IT organizations' application strategies often aren't dynamic enough to handle changes in technology."

We spend a lot of time, effort and money building systems which (if we're...

There are two ways to look at integration:

Integration is a cost: poorly planned system procurement and development means that we carry the technical burden of multiple applications with overlapping concerns. Data must be replicated between systems in order for them to function. The mechanisms we use to perform this...

Deeply ingrained in our philosophy at Deloitte Platform Engineering is the idea of building solutions by composing services to fit a unique business need. Nothing really new here, people have been talking about "mashups" about "service composition" and "composite applications" for a while and we've seen our customers...