Journal 11

Journal 11

April 2007

Foreword

Dear Architect,

Welcome to Journal 11, the theme of which is "Infrastructure Architecture." A few years ago, one of my former colleagues, Pat Helland, came up with an architectural analogy called Metropolis. His vision was to create a parallel using city planning and building architecture to give meaning to complex challenges in software architecture. One of the things that I always remembered from Metropolis is that, as IT architects, we often spend proportionally too much time on our "own buildings." Many of us are guilty of obsessing over what a "building" will look like, and how it will perform. As a result, however, we sometimes forget the bigger picture—for example, how our building will fit into the larger city. For building architecture, a building must conform to city plans in a number of areas, including road plans, utilities, transportation, and so forth. Taking this forward for this issue of the journal, I wanted to explore the same challenges as they relate to our industry.

To lead this issue, we have a group of authors—Shaun Hirschman, Mathew Baldwin, Tito Leverette, and Michael Johnson—who have written an article called "Mass-Hosting High-Availability Architectures." In this article, the group shares key aspects for creating a hosting architecture that is both resilient and scalable. Following this, we have Marc Holmes and Simon Cox with a new view of HPC that they call High-Productivity Computing. Marc and Simon have been working together on exploring the end-to-end and infrastructure considerations for HPC. Mario Cardinal follows with an article called "Test-Driven Infrastructures." Mario is a big proponent of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and in this article outlines how TDD can be applied at an infrastructure level.

To continue our Architecture Journal Profile series for this issue, I had the unique opportunity of meeting with Don Ferguson to ask him about what it means to be an architect. For those who don't know, Don used to be an IBM Fellow, and the Chief Architect in the Software Group at IBM, before joining Microsoft recently. Following Don's interview is an article from Jim Wilt called "Conquering the Integration Dilemma." Jim shares some of his integration challenges, which includes introducing us to a mapping pit of despair!

To round out this issue, we have two great articles on the subject of real-world Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Shy Cohen leads with an ontology and taxonomy of services that can reside in a SOA, many of which map well into the infrastructure space. Our last article for this issue is called "Versioning in SOA," from Boris Lublinsky. Boris takes a challenge that many architects face today and looks at multiple approaches for service versioning.

Well, that is everything wrapped up for another issue. I hope that the articles within help you not only to think about the type of building that you are putting together in your metropolis, but also the infrastructure that's needed to help people get there!

Simon Guest

Articles in This Issue

Mass-Hosting High-Availability Architectures

By Shaun Hirschman, Mathew Baldwin, Tito Leverette, and Michael Johnson
Discover the secrets to creating hosting infrastructures that are scalable, reliable, secure, and easy to maintain.

Delivering End-To-End High-Productivity Computing

By Marc Holmes and Simon Cox
Explore a technical solution for creating a distributed, service-oriented HPC service.

Test-Driven Infrastructures

By Mario Cardinal
Infrastructure teams have an opportunity to learn from software-development teams how to express architecture decisions using test scripts.

Architecture Journal Profile: Don Ferguson

Interviewed by Ron Jacobs
Don Ferguson is a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Platforms and Strategy in the Office of the CTO. Get the update on his career and his thoughts on architecture.

Conquering the Integration Dilemma

By Jim Wilt
Learn a definition of the integration dilemma, and what you can do to avoid it in your environment.

Ontology and Taxonomy of Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture

By Shy Cohen
Services can come in many shapes and sizes. See how to use a common ontology and taxonomy to describe them.

Versioning in SOA

By Boris Lublinsky
The idea of service versioning is simple, but the implementation requires a lot of thought and planning. Learn several approaches for enabling this in your organization.

Download this issue here

This article was published in the Architecture Journal, a print and online publication produced by Microsoft. For more articles from this publication, please visit the Architecture Journal Web site.