Enterprise Architecture | Why is it important?

Enterprise Architecture practice has been there for decades but in last few years it is regaining popularity as it is one of the key initiatives driven by CxOs.

So, why is it important for an Enterprise?
Here are some of the key rationale behind the same:

1. Holistic Approach
Individual divisions across the enterprise only address business problems in their vicinity; but EA team will have holistic point-of-view and work towards in addressing the problems across the enterprise.
For example, having a Credit Card Loan Processing System for London division is addressing locale specific business demands but EA team can align this solution at enterprise level & might provide inputs to make it generic for making it reusable across the enterprise.

2. Consistency in Delivering Solutions to Business Problem
Once we have EA in place, a business solution can be delivered in more structured & consistent way. Established Reference Models for Business Demands
For example, if there is need to develop a Credit Check System, then enterprise reference model (if not available, then Industry Reference Model) will help in establishing consistent architecture for this solution.

3. Building Enterprise-wide Repository
Repository created in the process of establishing EA in an organization like Tools Repository, Architectural Artifacts Repository will encourage reuse & standardization across the enterprise.

4. IT Governance
EA goes hand-in-hand with IT Governance & collaboratively helps in establishing governance across the enterprise, which helps in building controlled & directed corporation. It acts like a framework for leadership, organizational structure, business processes, standards, practices, etc.

5. Defined Business/Technical/Information System Architecture:
Last but not least, as part of EA establishment in the organization, a clearly defined business, technical and information system architecture gets developed during the process. This also creates opportunity to business & IT people to come together & re-validate them.

Some of the popular EA frameworks are TOGAF, Zachman, FEA, Gartner, DoDAF & I have seen most of time there is a custom EA architecture extracting best of the practices/standards/tools from all of them.

Feel free to discuss it further in more detail.


Disclaimer:
All data and information provided on this site is for informational purposes only. This site makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis.This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer or any other organization.

Benchmarking – One of the Best Practices for Measurement of your Application Stack Performance

With growing number of “change requests” coming to your application, it is increasingly difficult task to ensure that your application is not introducing performance issues. One of the best practices to ensure this is to “baseline” your performance statistics and “make it a yardstick” to measure the performance of application post major release (having many CRs). Across the industry, it is generally called as “Benchmarking".

Benchmarking is one of the best strategies to measure your hardware performance (to know its capacity) or any OS/application server performance or any framework performance, generally for “capacity modeling” or “evaluate & choose the best hardware/software/framework” on the basis of benchmarking numbers.

For Java, Benchmarking JVM, GC (Garbage Collectors) or any JDBC library can be used to evaluate & choose the best among the pack.

Now, coming back to Benchmarking your own custom application, it will give you following benefits:

• Capacity Modeling – Knowing the capacity of your application stack

• Baseline (Yardstick) – Establishing a yardstick against which all future releases will be based upon; subsequent releases should improve these numbers, not decrease.

• Measurability

• Choosing the best alternative on the basis of stats

Suggested Benchmarking Parameters for your application:

• Response Time in Seconds

• Throughput – Requests Processed Per Second

• Memory Usage, CPU Usage, Database Connections Usage, Disk I/O Usage

One of the most important steps in establishing Benchmarking numbers is “cycles of performance runs” (at least 3 cycles, more is better as it gives more reliable data).


References:

1. Microsoft Article - Benchmarking Web Services using Doculabs

2. IBM Article – Benchmarking Method for Comparing Open Source App Servers

3. Benchmarking AOP Implementations - http://docs.codehaus.org/display/AW/AOP+Benchmark

4. Benchmarking ESB: http://esbperformance.org/wiki/ESB_Performance_Test_Framework

Many Development Methodologies - Which one to choose, Hyrbid might be the ANSWER

Well, the time has changed like the speed of sound since the era when Waterfall model was considered to be best methodologies for Software Development.

But now in new information age, where frequently changing user requirements, challenging timelines, tight budget and competitive bids are driving factors, IT industry offers many methodologies namely Prototyping, Spiral, RAD, Rational RUP, Agile (Scrum, XP, DSDM - Dynamic System Development Method, FDD - Features Driven Development, Lean Software Development) and the list goes on.

Considering all the available options as Development Methodologies in today's world, it is increasingly difficult to choose a single methodology for all your projects inside a single organization. But having multiple methodologies in a single organization generally creates chaos and obscures roadmap for future projects.

"A slightly different approach to tackle this challenge is to adapt best practices from short-listed methodologies, which suits best for your organization and formulate a hybrid-development methodology specific to your organization."

To illustrate, lets imagine a Development Methodology, which has following features:

• Sprint approach of Scrum for handling features/requirements in quick turnaround
• Daily Scrum (or Standup Meeting) to check progress of the project
• Feedback, Continuous Integration approach of XP
• Monitoring/Control of Waterfall SDLC (specially of larger projects)
• Eliminate Waste of Lean software development

Though it needs a considerable amount of research and analysis for any organization to formulate such a hybrid development methodologies, it will pay-off in long run and established a clear roadmap for future development.

Compare Persistence Mechanisms in Java using factors: ease of development, performance, scalibility, extensibility & security

  

	Ease of development	Performance	Scalability	Extensibility	Security
Entity Beans - CMP	High – Bean developer concentrates on business logic; persistence logic provided by EJB vendor	High - Application programmers delegate the details of persistence to the container, which can optimize data access patterns for optimal performance.	High – Container provides scalability (configuration based)	High	High – Container provided
Entity Beans - BMP	Low – Bean developer is responsible for providing persistence logic.	Uncertain – Depends upon the proficiency of bean developer	High – Container provides scalability (configuration based)	Low – Bean developer’s persistence logic needs to understand by others.	High – Container provided
JDO	High – Bean developer concentrates on business logic; persistence logic provided by JDO vendor	High - Application programmers delegate the details of persistence to the JDO implementation, which can optimize data access patterns for optimal performance.	High	High	High
JPA	High – Bean developer concentrates on business logic; persistence logic provided by JPA vendor	High – Best ideas from ORM (Hibernate,TopLink) and JDO	High – Container provides scalability	High - supports the use of pluggable persistence providers	High – Supports Standardized Security Model (Java)
ORM Frameworks	Medium – Reduces development time	Depends - some O/R mapping tools do not perform well during bulk deletions of data	High-to-Medium – Depends on ORM vendor	Low – Non-standardized	Medium-to-High – Depends on Vendor
DAO with direct JDBC	Low – Bean developer responsible for persistence logic.	High-to-Medium - But Depends upon the proficiency of bean developer	Medium-to-High – Depends on expertise of Developers	Medium-to-High – Depends on expertise of Developers	Medium-to-Low – Needs to be handled by bean developer

Dependency Injection - Design Paradigm and Available Solutions

Ever since Dependency Injection (or DI) coined by Martin Fowler, it has been praised & accepted by many people and frameworks like Spring has used it as their USP as well.

With EJB3 interceptor model & JSR 330, DI has established further ground with Sun Microsystems likeness towards it.
DI can be defined as:
"DI is a special form of IOC (Inversion of Control) and design paradigm flexible enough to allow external dependencies to be configured/applied dynamically to software architecture."

Martin Fowler has identified 3 types of DI:

• Type 1 or interface injection, in which the exported module provides an interface that its users must implement in order to get the dependencies at runtime
•  Type 2 or setter injection, in which the dependent module exposes a setter method that the framework uses to inject the dependency
•  Type 3 or constructor injection, in which the dependencies are provided through the class constructor

DI is language-agnostic and there are solutions available in PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. This article goes further in listing solutions available from Java's perspective.

Available Popular Solutions in Java for DI

• EJB3 Interceptors (Standardized Model by Sun) 
• JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java (recently finalized for future Java releases, led by Google, SpringSource, Sun)
  
• Spring framework (one of the earliest framework to promote DI)
• Google Guice (pronounced as "juice")
• Apache HiveMind (Services & Configuration Microkernel)
  
• Apache Tapestry IOC
• JBoss Microcontainer
• Plexus
  

 Benefits of DI

• Reduction of dependent code
• Configuration Flexibility

Drawbacks of DI

• Excessive usage can lead to complicated/hard-to-debug code
• Difficult to understand complex DI usage because of dynamic injection

EJB3 – The much improved easy-to-use server-side component model

Earlier EJB versions have been criticized for their heavy-weight components model, but with EJB3 drastic improvements have been made to offer best possible server-side component available in the industry.


The primary goal of EJB3 is to reduce complexity EJB development model and provide ease-of-use and faster development approach to server-side components.

EJB3 has edge over other competing technologies with respect to server-side component model and I have highlighted some of the points below:
1. Annotations – The powerful feature of J2SE 1.5 contributes to the ease of development of EJB components. Using annotations, its “piece-of-cake” to convert a POJO to an Enterprise Bean.

2. Interceptors & Dependency Injection (DI) – DI provides optimization by resource injection during compile-time and frameworks like Spring have been using it for a long time. Utilizing the latest features of Core Java (J2SE 1.5 onwards), DI contributes in optimizing EJB3 development using Interceptors.
Developers can concentrate on business logic only and even log messages, security, etc. can be handled by Interceptors, which can be applied at method level or component level.

3. Elimination of Extra Classes – With EJB3, there is no need to provide Home Interface for Session Beans. Also, required interfaces for persistence entities have been eliminated as well.

4. Replacement of Entity Beans – Heavyweight Entity beans have been replaced by lightweight JPA Entities (POJO based) and it is a major shift in the way persistence has been handled so far. JPA takes the best of all worlds by providing best features of ORM tools (Hibernate, TopLink, IBATIS) , EJB2.1 CMP persistence model and JDOs.

5. Optional Callback Methods – Container Callback methods are optional and developers are no longer need to provide empty methods (general practice earlier) for these methods.

6. POJO Model – EJB3 has finally accepted plain Java objects for local/remote & enterprise bean classes and there is no need to implement any interface or extend any class. Annotations simplifies this process and bean type/client type are indicated by using annotations.

Though industry has already started using other persistence models (specially heavily relying on ORM tools) & POJO based frameworks for server-side component models, EJB3 has come up with new improved and standardized approach and it might be the revival of it.

Best of Luck to EJB3 model!!

Cloud Computing - The Next BIG Thing in IT

Cloud Computing is a new buzzword in IT industry and if you do some analysis, then you will find out, it is more than just a “buzzword”. It is the next revolutionary thing for IT in forthcoming decade.

So, why the “hype” – its because it offers to solve a complex problem of procuring IT capabilities using on-demand easy-to-use approach, which is scalable, flexible and based on pay-as-you-use basis.

For example, if you are building a web-oriented project, traditionally you need to think of initial capital investment for procuring resources (e.g.hardware box, application server license etc).But using Cloud Computing, you can deploy your Web Application to Amazon EC2 without initial capital investment and you can pay as per usage basis.

Cloud Computing Definition:

A pay-as-you-use computing solution (scalable & flexible) to deliver IT-enabled capabilities (software, infrastructure, platform) as a Service (xaaS) using Internet technologies.

Key benefits: Rapid implementation time (infrastructure is readily available using public cloud), usage based payment services & flexible scalability.

Cloud Services (xaaS)

• SaaS (Software as a Service, ex- Google/Yahoo Mail, Google Docs)
• PaaS (Platform as a Service, ex- Amazon EC2)
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, computer infrastructure as a Service, like storage, network equipment, data center, etc. ex-Amazon S3)

Cloud Computing Solution Types

Cloud solution can be of three types: Public Cloud (where you avail it from third-party) , Private Cloud (you create your own cloud using your infrastructure, ownership lies with you, more secure) and Hybrid Cloud (most viable, combination of both worlds)

Public Cloud Solution: Amazon EC2/S3, Google AppEngine, SalesForce, vmware’s vCloud, Sun Cloud

Private Cloud Solution: vmware vSphere (Cloud OS)

Hybrid Cloud Solution: vmware vSphere with vCloud

I will prefer Private Cloud as it is not only Secure but also allows you to use your existing infrastructure resource (using virtualization) for creating your own virtual world. Private Cloud OS like vmware vSphere can give you a great experience in managing the entire infrastructure seamlessly.

Cloud Computing Benefits

• Hardware Cost reduction (vmware offers 15:1 virtualization ratio)
• Pay on Usage basis
• Maximum Resource Utilization
• Scalability & Flexibility (easy scale-up, scale-down)
• Reduced Environmental Impact (Green data centre)
• Reduced Operational Cost
• Reduced Other Cost (70-80% reduction in datacenter space, power, cooling infrastructure)

Cloud Computing Concerns

Security (on Public Cloud), New technology, Legal Issues/Privacy (in Public Cloud), Dependence on constant connectivity (Internet Availability in Public Cloud),  Tranparency with Service Provider (in Public Cloud), Actual Cost (pay as you use may not be cheap at times in Public Cloud)

Conclusion

Use Cloud Computing by developing a clear cloud computing strategy (long-term) and use incremental approach by targeting short/medium term goals aligned with your long-term strategy. Also, analyze your applications and build portfolio of them as per their suitability for private/public cloud alongside.

Disclaimer:

All data and information provided on this site is for informational purposes only. This site makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis.This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer or any other organization.