Jason Bloomberg - The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT

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Copyright 2013 by Jason Bloomberg. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Bloomberg, Jason, 1961

The agile architecture revolution : how cloud computing, REST-based SOA, and mobile computing are changing enterprise IT / Jason Bloomberg ; with contributions from Ronald Schmelzer.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-40977-0 (hbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-42199-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-55405-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-41787-4 (ebk); 1. Business enterprisesTechnological innovations. 2. Management information systems. 3. Service-oriented architecture (Computer science) I. Title.

HD45.B5466 2013

658.4038dc23

2012038783

To Ronald Schmelzerbusiness partner, mentor, colleague, parallel entrepreneur, curmudgeon, and friend.

Foreword: The Agile Architecture Revolution

The core thrust of architecture has been to define core business requirements, and then construct the IT solution to meet those requirements, typically as instances of software. While this seems like a simple concept, many in enterprise IT went way off course in the last 10 to 15 years.

IT does not provide the value it once did, meaning IT does not meet the objectives and expectations of the business. Indeed, IT has become a cost center where the resource burn increased significantly over the last 20 years, while the value to the business decreased relative to costs. This can't continue.

We've tried all of the tricks. With waterfall types of approaches to application architecture, the time it takes to move from understanding the requirements to the final deployed system could be years. Thus, by the time the system is completed and deployed, the business requirements likely have changed, you're back to the drawing board, and the delivered system has significantly diminished in value.

To address the latency issues around the waterfall, those who design and build systems turned to the concept of interaction. This means moving through cycles of understand-design-develop-deploy, over and over again, until there is something that resembles the desired business solution. Iteration approaches to software development often lead to poorly designed and lower-quality systems because you get it wrong over and over again, seemingly to get it right once. Moreover, as requirements change, it's back to the iterations again, sometimes in a never-ending loop.