Daily Archives: March 12, 2009

Response to Jonathan’s “Sun’s Network Innovations (3 of 4)” article

Leave a Reply · 12/03/2009 · 16 of 21 reads (last 12 months vs since 2024)

I posted the following comment in response to Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog post and vlog “Sun’s Network Innovations (3 of 4)“, however Jonathan and his blog pixies can’t be up and reviewing this yet because it’s awaiting moderation (and too right too, it’s the dead of night in California, and frankly I’m happy Jonathan is keeping busy running Sun, as he’s our CEO, if you didn’t know).

Hi Jonathan,

In 1998 I was involved in building Harrods Online as Chief Architect (employed by Harrods). We used a heavily Netscape based stack, using both Netscape Web Server and Netscape Application Server. And at the time Netscape had over 56% of the Enterprise Web Server market-share as well as being some of the best available technologies at hand.

Both of these technologies were available under free to use licenses from Netscape, with payment for support on top. Well I have to tell you in three years running this stack in production we never once paid for support, not a bean, nada, not on Christmas day, not on any day. Why? Because these were such stable technologies performing in their core capabilities that we knew from direct experience that very little would go wrong and because we architected a fully redundant and highly-available architecture based around horizontal scaling, network load-balancing, and avoiding session persistence where possible.

Looking back I would have liked to have paid Netscape something, even a token amount, because they were a great company, sadly missed, and perhaps if they’d been able to generate more revenues they’d still be with us. However this was a completely economic based business decision so we didn’t. Of course Sun eventually acquired these technologies through the iPlanet Alliance and we were able to integrate some of the innovation, robustness and domain knowledge into our own technologies.

I really wish at the time MySQL had been available, because we wouldn’t have had to pay Oracle either (our biggest license cost outside of Vignette, which was a core component). And before you ask, no, Harrods Online never went down because of any of the Netscape components, if anything by far the biggest problem areas were Vignette (esoteric, overtly Vignette specialised skill set required) and Oracle (connectivity to Vignette, Netscape, the other technologies we used, a number of content version issues, and it’s applicability as a web-scale technology). I know that some of these issues in these technologies have been resolved, but in both cases this was true then.

What’s cracking is that Sun has some of the best Architecture Services for Open Source deployments, especially large-scale implementations. Sun have a genuine sweet spot in the three areas needed to get these to work in the most cost efficient manner: Open Source Software (low barriers to entry, low barriers to exit, ease of availability, applicability to function), cost effective and highly price performant Hardware (Servers and Storage, both Open Source and Open Standards based), and the Professional and Managed Services needed to tie it all together and ensure operational effectiveness.

Frankly, I suppose we were ahead of the pack in many ways at Harrods Online, because the architectural principles used there are precursors of the one’s you’d see in a modern web-tier architectures, such as Flickr or Delicious. I know that if I was building that now not only would we have a near on 100% Open Source stack, but I’d also be looking at how I could offload some of our costs (especially in terms of low level and non-functionally focused skills and technologies) by utilising a Cloud Computing based infrastructure and platform provider.

All the best,

Wayne

If, and when, it gets authorised I’ll add a link here.

Response to the Capgemini CTO Blog article on the release of TOGAF 9

Leave a Reply · 12/03/2009 · 21 of 26 reads (last 12 months vs since 2024)

About five weeks ago, on the 3rd of February (2008), I celebrated the launch of the Open Group’s TOGAF version 9, with a short review of the new Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework standard.

My article was kindly picked up across the web, notably by the Open Group themselves and by the excellent Capgemini CTO blog in their article “TOGAF 9: A Sunny Day in San Diego“.

Afraid to say I couldn’t help responding to the author of the article, Ron Tolido (VP and CTO Continental Europe and Asia Pacific at Capgemini and Director at the Open Group), by adding a comment to it.

Being so busy I didn’t give it much thought after that, however last night, whilst at the inaugural meeting of the BCS Enterprise Architecture (EA) Speciality Group (SG) I met up with Matt Armstrong-Barnes, Chief Architect for the NHS Data SPINE Programme at BT, and a peer Chartered Fellow of the BCS (FBCS CITP), whom I haven’t seen since we worked together at HMRC.

Speaking with Matt we covered the release of TOGAF 9 and the article I’d written. He hadn’t seen the response I’d left at the Capgemini CTO Blog and guessing that you probably haven’t seen it either and, as it contain some further insight into my opinions on the latest release of TOGAF, I thought I’d repost it here too:

Hi Ron,

Many thanks for the mention; very kind of you.

When I last worked with Capgemini using the IAF I remember it being very much Zachman influenced, dare I say derived, in fact I recall the main overview diagram was extremely similar to the classic Zachman ‘framework’ diagram (a layered approach incorporating the six serving men model).

It’s a good job you guys have donated so much of your time and experience to the TOGAF standard, because frankly the Content Framework (or lack thereof) was the most obvious gap in the TOGAF portfolio. However I look forward to that particular area maturing because it is still only the first iteration. I believe that weaknesses in that particular area are the no.1 reason that Enterprises are still having to adopt more than one EA Framework to achieve a realistic EA.

There is one major gap still in TOGAF of course, but it shares this particular issue with all the major EA frameworks. And that is if only TOGAF could teach one how to architect then we might be getting somewhere!

Then we get down to the ‘minor’ practical areas that still need to be addressed, i.e. addressing ‘Ivory Tower’ syndrome, maintaining programme sponsorship and support, delivering an inclusive EA Governance structure that includes vendors and partners, rotation of EA staff into delivery programmes to maintain estate awareness, maintaining programme relevancy during the current economic downturn (when the Enterprise will be forced to focus on tactical issues), compartmentalising EA delivery into individual ‘steps’ which deliver incremental tactical advantage, getting the EA team to deliver value quickly, avoiding excessive focus on EA tools when the focus needs to be on defining a shareable and readily communicable EA, approaches to delivering an agile EA and derived estate which can readily adopt and react to industry and other outside pressures (such as radical innovation and ‘disruptive’ technology, changes in legislation, the effect of acquisitions and mergers, or new business stream and extreme business change). I would go on, but I’m sure you can think of many more yourselves.

Great post by the way, I enjoyed it a lot and agree wholeheartedly with much that you’ve captured here, especially around standardisation and having a common language across the EA community.

All the best,

Wayne

Since writing this a number of people have added comments, some of them quite informative, and this and the Capgemini CTO blog article itself are well worth five minutes investment if you’re interested in EA or TOGAF: