Brian Prince, the regional MS enterprise architect evangelist, presented October’s ArcReady event at the Mason Microsoft offices. Brian noted that the PDC keynotes will stream live this year, so pay attention and listen in for all the big MS announcements. The Q2 ArcReady event on December 2nd will focus on some of the soft skills of architecting your career. It’s a FREE event, and you can register here.

This month’s meeting focused on architecting distributed applications. Surprisingly, a lot of references to Salesforce.com, a platform I’m fairly intimately familiar with at LUCRUM. We use SFDC and have been able to do some pretty amazing things with it in very short amounts of time.

Trends in distributed app architecture certainly include SOA and the promise of reuse to drive IT agility. The goal with SOA being the ability to respond in, say, less than 9 months to the business users’ requests. SaaS, another delivery model and the Salesforce way, brings scalablity to single instance/multi tenancy to services delivery. And you get to offload the infrastructure to someone who cares. Web 2.0 is the framework that exposes and builds into applications collaboration and the network affect. As an aside here, if you ever get the, ehem, priveledge of working with any Blackbaud products, they would be the opposite of Web 2.0. Rich Internet Apps is another trend harnessing the UI power of Javascript and interesting design to create compelling user interfaces. And finally, cloud computing brings the utility model to computing with services such as Amazon’s S3 where you can spin up Linux servers as the need arises.

Options available to architects need to balance the tension between control and economy of scale where combinations include

1. On premesis hosted in your own data center
2. Hosted solutions running your own code on someone else’s infrastructure
3. Running your own bits on the cloud
4. Purchasing or leasing a vendor supplied app in the SaaS model

Build vs. Buy becomes your next choice as you need to balance strategic value against control based on each of the above scenarios.

Build vs. Buy

Brian shared with us the Microsoft blueprint for distributed architecture.

Architectural Blueprints

Take a look at the presentation to understand the available permeations and how your business needs map to the available architectures. Then decompose one of your systems or business processes and map to a specific architecture. Rinse and repeat with two or three more systems/processes. Finally settle on the three or four architectures that your organization will support and work within those parameters from a governance structure. From a reference perspective, the presentation will also map the logical architecture to the Microsoft product line.

Brian also covered Zermatt in session 2. Zermatt is the MS framework for implementing claims-based identity management. Unfortunately I had to attend a real work meeting, so I had to cut out early. You can find both presentations at the presentation link above.

- Andy