Presentation: TweetIf you are synchronous you are not resilient

Your software will break. The more sophisticated it is, the more often it will break. While traditional software design tries to eliminate failure through extensive testing, modeling and other techniques, highly scalable and dynamic systems need to embrace failure. Instead of trying to be robust, these systems need to be resilient, e.g. by restricting the extent of failure through isolated failure domains. Synchronous, state-sharing approaches like many object-oriented systems are notorious for propagating failure and make it difficult to isolate failure. Decoupled, asynchronous systems can add resilience.

This sessions takes a journey through coupling, asynchrony, conversations, and patterns for resilient software design.

Workshop: Architecting Enterprise Transformation Tweet

Many large enterprises are under pressure to transform their IT architecture and organization, as their business is attacked by "digital disruptors". IT architects can play a key role in such a transformation because they combine the technical, communication, and organizational skill to apply IT for the benefit of the business. Their job is not an easy one, though: they must maneuver in an organization where IT is often still seen as a cost center, where operations means "run"as opposed to "change", and where middle-management has become cozy neither understanding the business strategy nor the underlying technology.

This workshops illustrates how software or IT architects can play an active role in driving the digital transformation of a large enterprise. To do so, they need to extend their horizon beyond dealing with technology to navigate organizational politics, get management attention, work with external vendors, and pick the right battles. The examples and anecdotes originate from the presenter's experience as Chief Architect in a large financial services organization that is undergoing a massive IT transformation.