The Agile Architecture Revolution

JASON BLOOMBERG is President of ZapThink, a Dovel Technologies Company. He is a thought leader in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Cloud Computing, and helps organizations around the world better leverage their IT resources to meet changing business needs. He is one of the original Managing Partners of ZapThink LLC, a leading SOA advisory and analysis firm, which was acquired by Dovel Technologies in August 2011. He developed the only vendor-independent, Enterprise Architecture–focused SOA and Cloud Computing training available on the market. This training includes Enterprise Architecture considerations for various Cloud-based options, how to put together a Cloud road map, and how best to communicate the position the Cloud should take in the greater context of agile Enterprise Architecture.

FOREWORD xi

PREFACE xv

PART ONE—Enterprise as Complex System 1

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Agile Architecture 3

Deconstructing Agile 4

Architecting Software/Human Systems 8

Meta Thinking and Agile Architecture 10

Defining Architecture: Worse Than Herding Cats 12

Why Nobody Is Doing Enterprise Architecture 13

Complex Systems: At the Heart of Agile Architecture 16

CHAPTER 2 Shhh, Don’t Tell Anyone, but Let’s Talk about Service-Oriented Architecture 21

Rumors of SOA’s Demise . . . 23

Thinking Outside the SOA Box 26

Okay, So How Did SOA End Up Dead in the First Place? 28

Services: The Core SOA Lesson 31

Implementing Policy-Driven Behavior 34

What’s the Deal with Web Services? 38

The Third Conversation 41

Freeing Architecture from the Underlying Infrastructure 44

Implementing SOA without an ESB 47

The SOA Marketing Paradox and the Wizard of Oz 48

CHAPTER 3 Governance: The Secret to Satisfying the Business Agility Meta-Requirement 51

Organizational Context for Governance 52

Architecture-Driven Governance: Beyond IT Governance 54

Rethinking Quality 57

Introducing the Agility Model 60

Meta-Policy Governance 63

Interrelationships among Governance, Quality, and Management 64

Four Stages of Agile Architecture Governance 67

Architecture-Driven Governance and the Butterfly Effect 70

CHAPTER 4 The Enterprise as Complex System 73

Engineering the Enterprise with Complex Systems Engineering 73

Best-Effort Quality and the Agile Architecture Quality Star 76

Best-Effort Quality in Action 80

Resilience: The Flip Side of Agility 83

The Flash Mob Enterprise 86

CHAPTER 5 Agile Architecture in Practice 89

The Composition Vision for IT 90

Vision to Reality: Rethinking Integration 93

Aligning Agile Architecture with BPM 96

Business Modeling and Agile Architecture 98

Processes That Satisfy the Meta-Requirement of Agility 100

PART TWO—The ZapThink 2020 Vision 103

CHAPTER 6 You Say You Want a Revolution . . . 105

Five Supertrends of Enterprise IT 108

Continuous Business Transformation: At the Center of ZapThink 2020 110

Where’s Our Deep Interoperability? 112

The Crisis Points of the ZapThink 2020 Vision 113

Big Data Explosion and the Christmas Day Bomber 116

Stuxnet and Wikileaks: Harbingers of Cyberwar 119

Cybersecurity the Agile Architecture Way 125

The Generation Y Crisis Point 128

CHAPTER 7 The Democratization of Enterprise IT 133

Demise of the Enterprise IT Department 134

The Agile Architecture Approach to IT Project Management 136

Crisis Point: The Enterprise Application Crash 138

Replacing Enterprise Software: Easier Said than Done 144

PART THREE—Implementing Agile Architecture 147

CHAPTER 8 Deep Interoperability: Getting REST Right (Finally!) 149

Programmable Interfaces: The Never-Ending Story 150

REST to the Rescue 155

Dogmatic vs. Iconoclastic REST 161

REST vs. Web Services 163

Can REST Fix Web Services? 166

Does REST Provide Deep Interoperability? 168

Where Is the SOA in REST-Based SOA? 170

REST-Based SOA: An Iconoclastic Approach 173

CHAPTER 9 Finally, Let’s Move to the Cloud 177

Deja Vu All Over Again 179

Countering Vendor Spin with Architecture 181

Interlude: Neutralizing the Cloud Threat 183

Why Cloud Computing Scares the Platform Vendors 186

Architecting beyond Cloud Computing’s Horseless Carriage 187

BASE Jumping in the Cloud: Rethinking Data Consistency 190

Cloud Multitenancy: More than Meets the Eye 193

Keys to Enterprise Public Cloud 197

Why Public Clouds Are More Secure than Private Clouds 200

Why You Really, Truly Don’t Want a Private Cloud 202

Avoiding Unexpected Cloud Economics Pitfalls 205

Rethinking Cloud Service Level Agreements 208

Are Your Software Licenses Cloud Friendly? 212

Garbage in the Cloud 214

Beware Fake Clouds 217

Learning the Right Lessons from the 2011 and 2012 Amazon Crashes 219

Failure Is the Only Option 221

Cloud Configuration Management: Where the Rubber Hits the Clouds 223

Clouds, SOA, REST, and State 225

The Secret of a RESTful Cloud 229

BPM in the Cloud: Disruptive Technology 232

Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things 236

Location Independence: The Buckaroo Banzai Effect 238

Postscript: The Cloud Is the Computer 241

CHAPTER 10 Can We Do Agile Enterprise Architecture? 243

Frameworks and Methodologies and Styles, Oh My! 245

The Beginning of the End for Enterprise Architecture Frameworks 248

How to Buy an Agile Architecture 250

The Dangers of Checklist Architecture 253

CONCLUSION 257

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 261

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 265

INDEX 267