Cloud & Engineering

We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.

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The Composable Enterprise

Posted by Admin on 14 August 2014

Architecture, platforms, composable-enterprise, belief

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...

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Business Insights from Data in Motion

Posted by Admin on 23 July 2014

Architecture, elasticsearch, belief

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...

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Incremental Change

Posted by Saul Caganoff on 02 July 2014

platforms, belief

A billion dollars used to be a lot of money. These days it can buy you a small social network, a sports team or perhaps a high profile IT project disaster. ComputerWorld's round-up of top IT disasters for 2013 leads with the Healthcare.gov debacle, but Australia proves its world-class chops with the Queensland Health...

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Platforms Beat Monoliths

Posted by Admin on 25 June 2014

Architecture, platforms, belief

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...

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Technology is a Differentiator

Posted by Admin on 18 June 2014

belief

There are many catchcries that have been misinterpreted through history. Donald Horne meant it as an indictment when he referred to Australia as the "Lucky Country". Anne Thomas Manes said "SOA is Dead" to refer to the demise of SOA as technology "silver bullet" that could be applied without thought or substantial...

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The Benefits of A Layered Architecture

Posted by Admin on 11 June 2014

Architecture, platforms, belief

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...

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The Value of Integration

Posted by Admin on 04 June 2014

Architecture, platforms, belief

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...

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Marketing, Goldfish & Epistemology

Posted by Admin on 07 August 2012

belief

The IT debates continue - vehemently as ever - about which language, which architecture, which methodology and whether to use any methodology at all. Sometimes it feels like we're stuck in the veritable goldfish bowl admiring the shiny new castle that periodically presents itself. How could everyone be so right and so...

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