8 Things You Don’t Know About Architecting Your Business Infrastructure for Scale
What does it mean to “architect for scale” and why do you need to do so? Architecting for scale is about building and updating critical applications so they deliver what your increasingly demanding digital customers expect. Remember, your application’s performance, more and more, will be compared with the likes of Amazon and Instagram and Facebook. Architecting for scale is a way of thinking, designing, planning for, and executing so your applications meet the needs and demands
Cloud Providers Have Different Personalities: Whom Do They Remind You Of?
I recently wrote a blog post about the Pentagon’s decision to go multicloud instead of opting for a Microsoft Azure-only strategy. Because, after all, it IS the age of multicloud and polyclouds and hybrid clouds, and, well, it got me thinking about characterizing different vendors’ clouds and how those cloud vendors differ from one another. Some day I’ll get more serious and explain the functional differences, but not today. Today I’ll give each cloud vendor di
Cloud Myth: Serverless Solves All My Problems
It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the cloud, and the latest and greatest cloud service offering often seem like the solution to all your problems. However, like any new technology, understanding how and where to apply the technology is critical to successfully using the technology. This most certainly applies to the serverless computing, which many people believe will solve all their problems. Function as a Service (FaaS) offerings, better known as serverless computing, are provi
Dear Andy Jassy
Dear Andy, Congratulations on becoming CEO of Amazon. It seems like only yesterday that I worked with you at AWS, starting the Elastic Beanstalk service in 2009. You’ve done an amazing job with AWS over the years. And now, as of July 5, you’ve taken over the CEO role from the man himself, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, just as Steve Ballmer did for Bill Gates and Tim Cook for Steve Jobs. Congratulations! You’re in heady company. Of course, the media is asking, “Can Andy Jass
Was the Pentagon Smart to Ditch a Single Cloud Strategy and Embrace Multicloud Instead?
You may have seen the recent news that the Pentagon has decided to implement a multicloud strategy to replace the previous JEDI program. Essentially, Pentagon officials decided against a Microsoft-only cloud strategy and moved to a multi-vendor plan, which will now include Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and others. This decision is a great victory for the cloud and competitive cloud offerings in the government arena, but is it a good strategy for the U.S. military itself? Will it be
Cloud Myth: The Cloud Isn’t Secure
One of the biggest misconceptions that companies new to the cloud have is that the cloud isn’t secure. They wonder, can you trust the cloud? This can show up many ways, but a common way is in how a company deals with cloud security. Security is very important to nearly all companies. Moving to the public cloud means taking my application that is safely behind your company’s firewall, and putting it on a publicly accessible cloud service. This requires trust. Can I trust the cloud t
Lee Atchison Joins InfoWorld as a Regular Contributor
Stay tuned! On June 21, I’m joining InfoWorld as a contributing author and will be publishing a bi-weekly article. I will bring you articles about cloud computing and application modernization. I’ll have articles ranging from maintaining high availability to team organization. From data partitioning to sharding. From identity management to dealing with availability mistakes. From metric classes to cloud finances. From infrastructure architecture to organization architecture. I
What Is the Difference Between SLA and SLO?
What are SLAs? What are SLOs? SLAs, or Service Level Commitments, are measuring a commitment to a given level of reliability and performance. In software terms, SLAs are usually described by commitments given to customers on the availability and operational readiness of a software application or system. SLAs are a commitment to provide a given level of reliability and performance. They are used to create a solid contractual relationship between service owners and customers. An overnight delive
Why Is Single Ownership So Important to a STOSA Organization?
STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and sophistication, a larger development organization is required to build and ma
What Is a STOSA Organization?
STOSA, or Single Team Oriented Service Architecture, is an important guiding principle for large organizations with many development teams that own and manage services comprising one or more applications. Modern organizations, operating modern applications at scale, require an ability to scale their organization as much as they require the ability to scale their application. As their application grows in complexity and grows in sophistication, a larger development organization must build and man