Sussna - Designing Delivery

by Jeff Sussna

Copyright 2015 Jeff Sussna. All rights reserved.

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978-1-491-94988-7

[LSI]

In the late 1990s, I had the honor of working at Forte Software, a company that produced a development and operations platform for what at the time passed for large scale distributed systems. The brainchild of Paul Butterwortha man I believe gets less credit than he deserves in the annuls of distributed systems historyForte allowed developers to develop applications in a scalable software services model, and then easily deploy the resulting user interfaces and services.

Auto-scaling was built into the platform, though you had to architect smartly to use it well. Redundancy and failure recovery were also selectable by checking a box and entering the number of instances you wanted of any given service. To this day, I have yet to see another developer environment that provides the experience Forte offered for distributed systemsmodern Platform-as-a-Service offerings included.

This was my first experience with an environment that bridged development and operations functions, andthough I didnt recognize it at the timeit created a different dynamic in the teams that built and deployed applications. I remember frequent conversations between the operations, quality assurance, and development teams; three or four people sitting at a computer discussing the best way to organize, test, scale, and replicate services to maximize availability and performance while minimizing costboth financially and psychologically.

These days, multidisciplinary approaches to software are a best practicenecessary, even, in enabling the extremes of scale weve reached in digital era. Weve even created a term to discuss these concepts: DevOps. The work functions of analysis and design, development, quality assurance, and operations are no longer a linear flow from one to the other, but a set of activities that must all be executed in the face of constant change.

Multidisciplinary software practices, to me, are at the heart of what makes the modern information technology possible: the retraining of technologists to understand and empathize with not only the end user, but also the other technologists that must work on or with the system; the breakdown and rebuilding of organizations to reflect the complex systems nature of the software they are creating; the creation of entire industry ecosystems around services, monitoring, tools, and practices that reflect complexity and constant motion.