So what does cafe blogging have to do with agile architecture?

You never know when you’ll have an inspiration about how to be agile as an architect.  I find that hanging out with friends chatting about anything but work actually frees the mind to wander outside the box.

According to a recent HostGator May 2010 Newsletter, they are now Safe Harbor Certified.

Though this isn’t directly related to cloud computing.  It is interesting in that is shows hosting services in USA are becoming sensitive to the fact that overseas privacy regulation and concerns are more stringent than those imposed by USA.

In Australia, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is apparently still not fully comfortable with the private information of customers of Prudential Wealth Management heading overseas.  You can read here about how the jury (APRA) is still out on whether or not they are comfortable with Prudential’s plans to use Salesforce.com which is hosted in the USA.

I am not aware of any agreement between Australia and USA or other country that is similar to the EU – USA Safe Harbour agreement.  The most likely place we need to establish such an agreement with is Singapore as that appears to be the target hosting site for the big clouds (Amazon, Azure) in Asia region.

The Agile Architect is a venture to help Architects become Agile.  The inspiration came when the leaders on a very large project I was working on decided we were going Agile. My first reaction to this news was, “Great! we’re going Agile!” because for many years I have been studying Agile and applying Agile techniques to the teams and projects I had been working on.  However, I had yet to be on a team where the management had totally bought in.

My second reaction was dread because I immediately remembered – I am the Architect.  

The Architect is typically the enemy of the Agile team.  To make matters worse, I was also playing role of Enterprise Architect.  In order for the project to continue to receive funding, they had to obtain Architecture Certification from me.  This is similar to obtaining Development Approval (DA) from local Council.  If you ever attempted to renovate or build, you will know, this is not an Agile Process.

The conflict between the Architecture and the Agile Team

The conflict between Agile and Architecture is well documented and discussed in the blogosphere.  Traditionally, Enterprise Architects enforce a governance model which is based on the Waterfall Model – the antithesis of Agile.  Architectures generally want a very well thought out end-state before anyone commits to coding.  Agile on the other hand says, we need to make something that works and then refine it through refactoring.

Bringing peace to Agile Teams and Architects

What I truly love about being an Architect is that it generally puts me right in the middle of conflict – or what we call stakeholders with competing concerns.  As the Architect, one of my key responsibilities is to perform Architecture Trade-off Analysis between these competing concerns.  I always see this as a way to bring peace between these warring tribes.

When I found myself right in the middle of this brawl, it dawned on me that this is a golden opportunity.  My being in the middle of this is not coincidental and I need to do something more than just survive it.  I need to help others as well.

Visit The Agile Architect

So please go visit The Agile Architect.  I really believe Agile will change the way we work and greatly improve the outcomes we achieve.  I believe in this more than anything I’ve seen in my >20 years of experience in IT.  That’s why I’m passionate about it, writing about it, doing something about it.  Please visit: leave your feedback and encouragement; subscribe and engage.  Help me make a big difference.

What happens to David Hall’s Blog?

I’ll continue blogging here on things that fascinate me.  Sadly, that is mostly technology because that’s what I do.  I subscribe to the axiom that, if you get a job you love, you never work a day in your life! If you’ve worked with me, you know I take never working a day in my life very seriously    I’ll also try to mix in some writing about the Bronte sunrise, travel and fun with raising the M&Ms (the kids).

Ciao for now!

Dialogue over Diagrams

As with the manifesto, we’re not saying that diagrams are  no longer required.   A diagram is still worth a thousand words.  Also, what would we do with our Visio and UML Tools?

The point of Dialogue over Diagrams is not to say we don’t need diagrams.  The point is that, as Architects, we need to remember that the Diagrams are not the final objective.  Working Software [products] is the final objective.  Working software comes when there is a common understanding between owners and builders of what needs to be built and how it needs to work in order to satisfy the vision of the owner.

I believe the best and fasted way to achieve common understanding is through dialogue.  The diagrams are still necessary, but they are no longer your primary focus.  They are enablers.

Dialogs help you communicate your ideas – they don’t communicate for you

The best use of the diagrams is to draw them on a white board or shine them on  the screen while you are standing there speaking. We obsess over the syntax of a diagram (uml, bpmn, etc…) to be sure there is no ambiguity.  But we should be expressing the contents of the diagram to an audience and soliciting their feedback.

Diagrams are great tools to help you communicate and get feedback.  Don’t just email it or point at it.  Explain it and ask for people’s feedback.

Crayons and Paper

Next time you plan to walk through a diagram up there on the light-pro, print a few A3 size copies of your diagram and pass them around the room with colored markers.  Have a little fun!  Make it enjoyable.  Give people in the workshop or meeting something to do other than respond to email with the Blackberry or iPhone.

Send me your comments on this.  I really want to know what others are doing to be more agile as Architect.

The Agile Architect is a project I’ve started with with Peter Wennerstein of Icon Innovations.   The inspiration came when the leaders on the project I’m working on decided we were going Agile and sent everyone to Scrum training.   The Vision is to give guidance and encouragement to all the architects out there who want to be a valuable part of Agile projects.  I’m putting together my experience as a leader in Software Development and long time Solutions and Enterprise Architect.  I’m teaming up with Pete because of his passion and talent for communicating with images, icons and multi-media.  I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with this and hope it really helps you on your journey down the path of becoming an Agile Architect.

If you are interested in this topic, please leave a comment to encourage me in this projects.

Thanks!

Cryptographers Warn About Security Dangers in the Cloud at RSA

In the article there was -

But it did not proceed to explain what precisely these vulnerabilities are.  I cannot discern whether this is simple fear mongering or if indeed, we are all little “Alices with a key” hoping our data is secure in the cloudy wonderland.

When we speak of the cloud, there are may different services from Software as a Service (SaaS) where you are sharing a common instance of an application and relying on the application or dbms security to prevent unauthorised access.  To Virtual Private Servers (vps) in which instances of your own virtual machine builds are hosted in a cloud environment.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

When thinking about the cloud, I am usually thinking about extending compute capacity through use of Grid technology.  The key concern generally is, the computations we’re sending to the Cloud use confidential data. But not just confidential data, the code or algorithm to be applied in the case of derivative pricing models, are proprietary as well.  Furthermore, the nature of these applications requires complete control of the entire software stack from os to business logic layer.  So having your own virtual machines is probably the most desirable model.

But is it safe?

I don’t think it is naive to believe that an instance of a hardened machine running amongst other virtual machines in a shared environment is secure.  For example, if I have a virtual host with all but ssh disabled, I have ipfilter, etc… and I’ve been careful to manage my private key used to authenticate my ssh session, anything in that virtual machine is secure.

I believe it boils down to how secure a VM is from the other machines and/or the hypervisor or hosting environment is.  Can you access the data of a VM other than via connecting to it via normal network protocols?

In Virtualization Security: What You Must Know, a series of steps required to secure your VMWare ESX environments is described.  Daniel Petri speaks about a the sorts of vulnerabilities to look out for.  My take on this is, VM’s are not automatically secure – like any environment, it’s up to diligence in a number of areas.

Next steps – Turnkey Grid Node

The security of VMs in a VPS environment is certainly interesting and a challenge to address before you go into the cloud.  But next thing I’d like to explore with Liraz Siri at Turnkey Linux and see if they wouldn’t want to build us all a grid node appliance.

See ya next time.
Technorati Tags: cloud, vps

I’ve recently been working with a team who have been trying to adopt Agile methods, but who rely funding from our central Project Approval Committee (PAC).  The PAC submissions and governance processes such as Information Security Certification and Architecture Certification are designed around Waterfall, not Agile.  So, we have something of an impedence mismatch.

This is not the first large enterprise I’ve worked for where we had precisely the same challenge.  I spent 13 years at Citigroup (first Salomon Brothers, merged into SalomonSmithBarney, merged into Citigroup).  In my role as an Enterprise Architect and member of the Global Architecture Team, I worked with many development teams to attempt to align their desire to move to Agile with the waterfall based governance process.

Since I think there are many other organisations out there who could benefit from what I’ve learned and hope to achieve at Westpac.  I know there are thousands of developers who are pationate about their work and know adopting Agile methods would greatly improve their outcomes.  I hope through some research, collaboration and cooperation, we can reconcile this mismatch and release that pashion and power in our organisations.

One avenue to start with is to look for work in the area of reconciling PMI processes with Agile.  Along these lines I found this presentation InfoQ: Mike Cottmeyer on the Agile PMP.  I’ll summarise interesting bits in a later blog.

If this topic is of interest, please leave a comment to encourage me to continue.

I have never spent much time working with virtual machines because I really thought they were most useful to vendor or pre-sales guys who need to demo a complete stack of technologies without having to install them at a given site.

But something clicked – some say the penny dropped – when I saw Turnkey.  If you’ve not seen their website, have a look.  I think the idea of pre-packaging a set of technology tools into a single image which you can just download and boot under a virtualisation solution like Vmware or VirtualBox is brilliant.  But it made me realize that I should use the technique for my work.  I could setup virtual machines with the appropriate toolset for a given task and be able to host in on my PC at work or my Mac at home and not worry about polluting my home environment with a bunch of tools for work and vice versa.

Sorry if this is so obvious, but for me it’s been a bit of a revelation.

Why Grails?

First question you may ask is why do I need a Grails Virtual Appliance?   I need a Grails appliance because I am starting to work on a project performance tuning a complex Trading and Risk Management System.  The system is java based and has a logging framework that can be configured to log response times of key internal functions.  This data could be very useful in analysing and identifying performance bottlenecks.  Problem is these logs are written to text files and are pretty difficult to use without being parsed, correlated and graphed.

The system is best described as Event Driven and Multi-tiered.  There is a core server and numerous Engines which perform tasks in response to events generated by other parts of the system.

I need a technology that can quickly present reports or graphs, drill down, etc.. I don’t want to build it in Java, but there is so much java in the project, groovy looks best because it’s dynamic and script like.  Grails because I want quick set of web pages, but don’t want to do much development.  The main point is not develop a website, but to make detail diagnostic data available quickly so I can get on with the real job.

The Grails Virtual Appliance

To create a new virtual appliance, I thought first I’d pick a base appliance from Turnkey and add whatever I needed.  I basically need the following:

• Data base - I need a data base into which the diagnostic logging data is to be written and read by the grails app for display and analysis;
• java jdk - of course this is pretty essentail;
• java servlet engine – I couldn’t figure out if Grails comes with one embedded or you have to deploy.  My favourite is Jetty of course.

Maybe that’s it.  Let’s try it and see.

Picking Turnkey Virtual Appliance

There are a number to choose from, but none have exactly what I need.  Here’s the choices:

• Use the core and do it all myself;
• Use the Tomcat and add MySQL;
• Use the MySQL and add Java

To either of these I need to add Groovy and Grails.  Just counting the packages I’d have to add, I’ll start with Tomcat since it’s already got java, tomcat and apache on it.  I can just add MySQL, Groovy and Grails.

Grooy and Grails

This should be very straight forward, just download grails install and set a couple of environment variables.  From what I’ve read, the Groovy jar is included in Grails.  Too easy.  I’ll update the post shortly with how it goes.

I’ve had trouble explaining what it was about Australia that makes me stay.  But a recent newspaper article about a famous cartoonist has really helped to clear it up for me.

Interestingly enough, the article is about a famous political cartoonist named Pat Oliphant. Anyone who’s ever read the Washington Post would know Oliphant.   Having grown up in Washington DC, I always thought Oliphant, was an American.  Well guess what, he was born in Australia!

So, the revelation about why I love Australia is not just that Oliphant is really an Aussie.  It is what Mike Steketee, of The Australian, wrote in his 14/11 article in the Weekend Australian about Oliphant.  In there he explains it is perhaps [Oliphant's] Australia attitudes… why Australia turns out so many world-class cartoonists: a natural inclination to challenge authority, a larrikin streak, a preference for plain speaking and not taking yourself too seriously.

When I read this I thought, wow, that’s it!  It’s the Australian Attitude. That is what I love about being here.  That is what I see in my best friends in Australia and to a large extent, it describes me.  Must be why I feel at home here.

Thanks Mike!  Thanks Australia!