M&A and TOGAF

During an interesting discussion online on Mergers & Acquisitions, a basic question arose — if we consolidate technologies & tools used across the two merging companies, would it suffice most of the Architecture needs for the new company ?

Maybe; but in most cases, No.

A more formal approach is required to make sure we do not end up with a half cooked chowder served in a platinum goblet. We need means to formalize a recipe that takes care of most the business & stakeholder concerns while making sure we have added essential quantities of innovation and budget to the recipe.

What if we could exploit learning from TOGAF and its 4 domain pillars (BDAT) as the base line?

As the first essential requirement, management, stakeholders and technology leaders must define and agree upon an Architecture vision. The vision must represent the desired state of Architecture that cuts across the BDAT (Business, Data, Application and Technology) pillars. Furthermore, vision must act as the means to communicate with other partner leaders on where the new company is headed in the next 3–5 years.

Think of vision as a simple but appealing menu at the Michelin starred restaurant — — just enough to interest the diner. For typical small to medium enterprises going through a merge, think of at least 2–3 months to define this, as this would essentially become the guiding star for the rest of the architecture detailing exercise in the coming days.

Once we have defined the vision, it’s critical to have the current state of architectures ranked against the vision (think of maturity models). This could be as simple as 1,2,3,4,5 with the vision ranked at 5, while current architectures at rank 1; especially if we just adopt everything from both companies as-is before going through the below exercise.

Each cycle of the TOGAF ADM in the coming months should help us get to rank 5 as we reassess our rank periodically — every quarter/year. This is similar to Michelin Star 1 going until 3.

Following the TOGAF ADM is quite perfect for our need while detailing each of the BDAT pillars.

Business (Common processes which are procurement, operations …), Data (kind, tools, policies …), Application (Toolsets, policies) , Technology (Service Registry, SOA, micro services, neural networks…) pillars require many viewpoints to be created as required.

In addition, typical cross cutting viewpoints like Devops, Infra, HR, too must be assessed and detailed during the ADM.

Carrying ahead with the BDAT definition, ADM does provide means to define the governance model (who, how, what) and when/who can change/refine the governance model itself.

Now is the perfect opportunity to define the road map for the next couple of years for the merged company that also helps better the targeted architecture rank.

As we observe, ADM does force us into absorbing a formal mechanism to identify the perfect recipe for our new architecture. ADM compels us to look into opportunities (even across innovation programs active in the two companies) that could pop up during the merger that could further lead to defining new business processes/tools/use cases/products too.

Once the first cycle of the ADM is complete, we could have reference enterprise architectures that partner businesses can consider. All documentation including the reference models, process changes, view points, governance models, recipes�, principles could now be captured in the TOGAF enterprise continuum.

Soup is now being served. This time it was well cooked and served in a proper china soup bowl.

EventChain

Applying Blockchain to Event Sourcing

Event Sourcing pattern at the core requires an event store to maintain the events. What if we add these events as it arrives into a blockchain ? This should effectively make sure the events have not been tampered with. The plan would be to initiate typical blockchain mining after which the event is added to the “block-chain of events” — an “EventChain”.

The definite side effect is that until the mining is complete, the business transaction cannot be internally marked as complete. Considering the time typically taken for mining, this would probably be an offline job.

Tamper Proof

The typical challenges faced by organizations who employ event sourcing and the event store is about securing the events. What if the DB admin for the event store manages to inject/remove events ? The replayed events and resulting projections are no longer valid in this case. Event chains should solve this issue for typical event stores.

Exploit the distributed infrastructure.

For private event chains , where businesses do not want the chain nor events to be exposed, existing distributed systems/hosts can be exploited for mining. Your event store DB cluster hosts, event sourcing services hosts, API hosts, cache cluster hosts and others that are spread across geography could be exploited for the same.

GDPR Challenges

There are cases where regulations require personal data to be removed from all data stores. In our case, this is about removing the related set of events from the event chain. Without the event chain, removing events from the event store was quick and easy.

Resetting the event chain when events are required to be deleted is challenging especially if there have been many events after the event(s) in concern. This would require re-mining the rest of events after removing the event(s) that had personal data all the way down to the most recent event. As this is an extremely time and compute intensive operation, it’s not recommended to store events that contain personal data in the event chain.

Snapshots

As the events from the event store can be played back to recreate a state at a point in time (“projections”), we could in fact have “snapshots” to identify a specific projection in time. We could link this snapshot as a child branch to the main event chain tree such that it’s not required to recalculate the projections each time; while making sure the projections themselves have not been tampered with.

We could look at having many child branches/trees for the different filters/conditions too.

Kafka Streams has an edge over Service Fabric ?

Compared against the .NET/Azure offerings, the level of abstraction enabled by Kafka Streams for event processing while exploiting underlying Kafka message-topic-queue patterns is pretty neat. 
 
Did come across an interesting framework that used C# libraries over Kafka Streams by @tonysneed in GitHub too here : https://wp.me/pWU98-1v2
 
Hope Service Fabric Mesh Reliable Actor or similar offerings from Azure catches up with Kafka Streams in terms of seamless integration for distributed event processing.
 
For a start, assuring messages are processed 'exactly-once' is a basic requirement for most distributed systems. Yet to come across native frameworks in the .NET world that use Azure/Akka.NET streams/Service Fabric Mesh or the likes that enable essential distributed capabilities like 'exactly-once' and others with minimal developer effort :!

#azure #kafka #confluent #kafkastreams #eventsourcing #akka #distributedcomputing #cloudarchitecture

Software Engineering lost in the cloud?

It would seem the cloud is making you a lazy software engineer. Engineers these days are now have a ready answer for most of the architectural and design concerns - "its taken care at the cloud". This perception is scary and appears to makes any tom-dick-harry engineer with minimal to zero computer/software knowledge "become" "master" software-engineer overnight. This halo is bothering. Whatever happened to clean code / patterns essential to designing your software during the days of distributed computing setup in local clusters ? Perhaps none today cares about minimizing traffic across nodes and syncing time across nodes nor time sharing and optimizing resources during your minimal time at the node. Not sure the solution for this until you are choked to become yet another Harry. hashtag

ServerFULL deployments

Moving away from Typical service deployments

Rather than have services typically tied to a set of machines and load balanced as-is today in the SOA/SaaS/Microservices world, what if we could just throw a set of servers and get them be assigned/allocated dynamically and more specifically, attain tight packing of services on the same hardware ?

Though mostly exploited on the Cloud with AWS Lamdas and Azure Functions, Serverless as a pattern are awesome for OnPremise deployments too. An interesting set of options for ServerLess OnPremise is available at this list. Though its quite a misnomer in cases of OnPremise deployments where we really need to bother about extreme and efficient hardware utilization of the server, it is preferable to call this approach as ServerFULL as the desired effect is to be fill up the server to the FULL ;)

Once the Docker Images/perhaps later Memory Images are available in shared In-memory/SSD drives, any of the machines/VM could be dynamically chosen for deploying the service and finally un-deployed down once done, allowing the space for the next.

OpenFaas/OpenWhisk seem to be on top of the list with both exploiting Docker containers. Though there is still constraints on elasticity (bringing up new VMs that finally run the Containers is time consuming, while adding more physical machine could take days), it is still an exciting means to efficiently exploit what is available on-premise in the moment.

Just like in Serverless world on the cloud, Services that consume high resources (CPU/RAM) for long duration and the ones that comparatively take higher time to spawn, might not be a candidate for being in the ServerFULL environment as these tend to block up the VMs/containers for long.

Think of designing typical business workflows with events, triggers, logic, nested flows and actions that span in/out, with these getting mapped into services by developers and further mapped to the ServerFULL world of machines dynamically - quite exciting times.

References: 

1. https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
2. https://winderresearch.com/a-comparison-of-serverless-frameworks-for-kubernetes-openfaas-openwhisk-fission-kubeless-and-more/

Structural Imbalance - In Software Systems

We come across many instances in the industry where "code-lumps" get deployed as software services/products with a beautiful UI included to cover up all the ugliness underneath. The design document too look fancy with usages of software patterns neatly listed. After all this stunt, these modules end up with a short life-span and before long, there are in-numerous critical issues being raised. 

In majority of these cases, product owners were forced into releasing these "code-lumps" that just weren't ready, while in other cases the anointed "architect" had no clues to why the "code-lumps" exist and why the pattern was used. At the first look, the software does appear to function as desired with all the components "working" great in the demos.

How could these be avoided in the first place ?

Just like in typical broken buildings we see across the road, structural imbalance refers to modules that doesn't making sense together. Individually, these chosen components / patterns appear perfect for the problem at hand but they just don't sync enough; structurally.

Right from a birds-eye/logical view to the drilled-down/code view, its critical that a dedicated team of architects reach consensus on the many choices being made every day by engineers.

Only if the team of architects had identified the applicable Non-Functional-Requirements (NFR) and defined them initially. Architects and the team of software designers could drill down into one or modules for a detailed design before coding. 

Though check-ins could be allowed from all engineers, none of it should reach the release pipeline until all the "code-lumps" were removed. Architects & designers must agree that the code comply towards the agreed NFR before promoting the code up its life-cycle.

Working closely with the architects, the product owner would now be more confident in communicating with the stake holders.

Do look forward related article on "Why all software engineers must NOT automatically become an 'Architect' " ; which in addition to looking at skill & interest, also touches upon the essential philosophical outlook required by any upcoming architect.

Self-optimization in Distributed caches.

Self-optimization in Distributed caches.

Distributed caches are systems where the cache data/objects are stored across distributed nodes/machine. When a data is stored/retrieved by the consuming application, one or more of systems in the distributed system serve the request. This paper attempts to identify self-optimization techniques that could be applied to this distributed cache. For a base implementation of the distributed cache, the open source project HoC (herd of cache @ http://hoc.codeplex.com) is referred. This project implements the distributed cache in .NET using the concepts of consistent hashing.

Self-Optimization in distributed computing refers to the capability of distributed systems to optimize independent of any intervention - machine/human. In a typical de-centralized and cooperative system like HoC, this means the nodes in the distributed cache can make decisions either independent or together. The latter would require the use of various consensus algorithms to be applied by this distributed cache.

Self-Optimization: Candidate Use Cases:

1.) Optimization of node load: decision made by internally by hosting nodes

In a typical consistent hash implementation, there is possibility that the number of objects stored in the cache of some of the nodes are high compared to the other neighboring nodes. This requires some of the data to be moved to the neighboring nodes. This would first include a node first asking the neighboring node for its load. If it detects that the total count of self is considerably higher, it would apply a partitioning of the objects stored and move the selected objects.

Locating an item in the cache would require multiple hops to reach the target node where the data is stored. Whenever a node gets a request for an item that has been moved to a neighboring node, it would require the call to be routed to the neighboring node. Each node is expected to maintain a list of objects that were moved and the target neighboring node to which the object was moved.

During each fetch, the path/nodes traversed to reach the target node could be returned back to the caller such that the next call to the same object directly calls the target server while avoiding the intermediary traverse across nodes.

The end result of this approach would be a more balanced store of objects across nodes.

2.) Self-Optimizing Consistent Hash Algorithm for load balancing

In a consistent hash implementation, similar to a hash bucket, the target node is selected based on the hash key returned by the underlying hashing algorithm. A typical problem would be that the data could get collected more at a specific server.  An alternative approach to solution 1 indicated above would be to apply machine learning approaches such that the change/adjustment -> fn(load distribution) required to adjust the hash algorithm can be identified. In this case, it should be noted that the fn(load distribution) required to normalize the overall load is specific to each system. A pattern could be detected for a specific system/installation and the load pattern for this system could be derived.

Applying this change to the underlying hash key algorithm would require a possible reset of the distributed system. Once reset, the adjustment learned/deduced by the system => fn(load distribution) would need to be applied each time a new object requires to be saved/retrieved. This adjustment function itself could be tweaked further down the time automatically by the system such that a new adjustment function is derived for the next run.

To monitor the overall usage pattern / load across nodes, it would be required to have a data store where the node v/s storage vs. load factor could be stored. Each data stored into the cache system would require its statistics to be stored into this data store. The next reset would require fn(load distribution) to be derived and applied to the underlying hash algorithm such that the load is more spread out in the next run.

This optimization technique assumes that the kind of data including its type, format, locale etc. does not vary considerably across resets.

3.) Optimized resource utilization on nodes

The CPU, RAM and other resources of each nodes would need to be used in a highly optimized fashion. Assuming these are not dedicated nodes, but machines shared by other processes too, it would be required to make sure the cache service does not overuse/bloat the machine resources. Optimized usage would require continuous monitoring of usage of these resources and adjusting the internal parameters accordingly. These parameters could be thread counts, memory allocated from heap, priority of thread/process (to free up CPU), receive/send buffer etc.

Each node should have capability to derive the optimal usage of resources on a continuous basis and refined after each optimization run. Parameter dependence (e.g.:- thread priority v/s memory) would be a factor that would need to derive again based on basic statistical record of resource usage. If the nodes are similar in deployment, learning from individual machine/node could be shared among other nodes.

4.) Optimization of node hit rate using duplicate stores.

If its seen that the hit rate of particular object/s is high on a specific node, it would be desired to have duplicates of the same object stored across nodes or across duplicate nodes such that a virtual relay/routing mechanism could be employed to divert the underlying request call. A virtual software relay could be employed just before this set of nodes such that it could route/direct to one of the clone/duplicate nodes. This mechanism assumes custom relay code that determines if the data has been duplicated and then diverts accordingly.

For this self-optimization, the systems needs to have a knowledge base that knows whether a duplicate item is being stored and its hit rate. Each node would need to determine based on the object hit rate in a time duration on whether to duplicate this object. In addition to basic object hit rate frequency, the system can learn from patterns in object usage – a specific group of objects might see high hit rate during Mondays and the system might assign duplicate nodes automatically on Mondays based on the learned hit rate pattern.

This method of store can be exploited as a disaster recovery option too. If one of the node in the duplicate set goes down, we are assured that the system continues to work as the service can now be taken care by the other nodes in the duplicate set.

5.) Optimization for near geography store.

Enterprise applications hosted on the cloud today are distributed on a global scale and when distributed caches are hosted on a cloud, it would be desired to have the most commonly used items near to the consumer geographically.

Dynamic cache clusters (not just cache groups, but cache within a cache in a consistent hash implementation) wherein each target node internally maintains another set of distributed cache could be employed. The dynamic cache cluster creation would be based on the geo usage statistics and would require the nodes to group themselves into a cluster and allocate one of it as a node in the parent cluster.

E.g.:- when the usage across Bangalore is seen to be high for a specific object, this object could be moved to a cluster/node near Bangalore. Internally routing tables would need to be updated accordingly to now point to the new target node.

More than likely, in typical implementations, it would be required to derive geo usage statistics for a group of objects rather than independent objects. The group of objects could be based on an ID or even a derivative function of a record.

6.) Optimized Network utilization

Similar to point 3, optimal usage of network is of high importance in any distributed system.  Whenever a routing happens (cases 5, 4, 1 mentioned above), each node could internally maintain a spanning tree with weightage of paths, with weightage directly reflecting the historical usage of that particular network path for a better optimized usage of the network. Physical routers could be programmed to use a specific path based on learning by each node.

Highly optimized Systems

Highly optimized caches would require one or more of the above strategies to be applied together wherever applicable. This would also require the fn(optimization parameters) to be derived on the go by the system independent of any additional input.