Building Self Contained Systems on Azure

In partnership with Microsoft, we posted a blog on Microsoft MSDN on our Open Compute Platform, a Self Contained System build on Azure Service Fabric.  It also discusses our new design of doing tenant isolation at the compute layer vs. the data tier to solve "Noisy Neighbor" challenges at scale.

Microsoft’s deep commitment to their customers enabled a hands-on design and validation cycle with embedded Microsoft architects and Azure service product team support. This enabled us to associate tangible business value to our technology choices as we made them.

—Jason Hamilton, Chief Architect, Software Development

Read the Full Post on MSDN

An Operational Playbook for an Effective Software Architecture Model

The Operational Playbook

I often get asked what I do for a living. This usually happens in small talk with an adult beverage in hand from a well-meaning person. Generally they aren’t really interested or really doesn’t understand software (which is fine by the way). I try to summarize with a few lines.

I ask “do you know what a building architect does?” They often respond “yes”. I tell them “I do the same with software”.

It seems to work (mostly). I politely go refresh my drink, and exit stage left, when they start asking me PC help desk questions. But I’ve been asked enough to stop and think about it a bit more.

Read the Full Post on Medium

The Fallacy of Being Vendor Agnostic

….in Large Scale Software Architectures…

Coming to Terms {a few key distinctions}

If you are in the Software (SW) Industry, you may have heard the term “vendor agnostic”. It has a lot of nuanced meanings and has its origins in IT (Information Technology). For our case, it simply means “not tying technical decisions to only one player in the field.” There’s plenty of areas where this makes sense, e.g. if your core business isn’t SW, if you’re buying a product etc…

The point of this article is there is one place it doesn’t make sense. Being agnostic when designing cloud architectures for commercial software is largely a fallacy. Why? Because we are talking the “scope” of enterprise level architecture combined with cloud “scale”. This doesn’t mean there aren’t considerations to weigh. However, it usually means teams’ are trying to apply IT models/mentality onto SW models/paradigms.

Content originally posted in full on Medium