Schedule

Mark Richards examines the the rise and fall of microservices. Over the past five years, microservices has been at the forefront of most books, articles, and company initiatives. While some companies experience success with microservices, most companies experience pain, cost overruns, and failed initiatives while designing and implementing this incredibly complex architecture style.

Threat modeling is a great method to identify potential security weaknesses, an important part of any secure design. But it's often ignored due to high cost and the time investment of classic approaches. Avi Douglen outlines how to use a lightweight, value-driven approach to embed security into the agile design process. No more top-heavy, big-model-up-front threat modeling that security pros love.

Applications are becoming so big and complex and most of the app is living on the client side. It’s hard to maintain those apps, and you’re usually making more bugs than you're fixing. Ivan Jovanovic explores how to fix this problem. Welcome to the era of micro-frontends, a microservice-oriented architecture on the frontend.

Architectures based on microservices have spread rapidly. Organizations are drawn to the promises of microservices but fail to carry the architecture through to the frontend, resulting in the dreaded frontend monolith. Erik Dörnenburg explores patterns harvested from practical use that show how to build micro-frontends to realize the benefits of microservices in systems with rich user interfaces.

The architecture pattern of microservices is found in many modern system landscapes, offering flexibility for the backend services. The frontend is very often realized as a monolith. Florian Rappl and Lothar Schöttner explore microservices and detail an example implementation of a highly modular frontend architecture that mirrors the dynamic of a modern microservices backend.

Moving to serverless allows you to take your application development, deployment, and economics to a new level while delivering software to your customers faster and cheaper. But there are also significant trade-offs to keep in mind. Pratik Patel takes a deep dive into serverless from an architecture point of view.

Software architects and enterprise architects work with a variety of roles; often the deep technical work is performed by other application architects or solutions architects. Maggie Carroll explores developing influence as well as skills and actionable techniques she found useful when creating a new enterprise architecture function and a tool for remaining productive as a leader.

It's a real challenge to develop great architects on your team when your organization offers limited opportunities to actually perform as an architect. Jean Bordelon examines approaches to give aspiring architects meaningful ways to grow and veteran architects ways to hone their craft as well as lessons learned along the way.

Architects in the enterprise are often seen as ivory-tower residents far detached from reality. Large-scale IT transformation across hundreds or thousands of applications and processes puts a whole different, and much more exciting, spin on enterprise architecture. Gregor Hohpe takes you on a serious but light-hearted tour of the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations.

Software is changing the world, and software developers need to open their eyes to the link between ethics and software. Rotem Hermon outlines some examples of ethical questions involving software and algorithms. You'll explore technology, sense of self, politics, and truth, and you'll try to understand what you can do about it.

Almost every software system is developed with good intentions but under difficult conditions and technical debt is built step by step. The whole system is woven into a messy big knob and every adjustment becomes an incalculable cost screw. Carola Lilienthal explains how you can organize and further develop your source code to prevent the emergence and increase of technical debt.

Rob Zuber outlines how to pick your "Goldilocks moment" to update your systems: not too early and not too late. He’ll also share some critical moments at CircleCI and how Docker, Go, Kubernetes, and other tools replaced simpler initial systems to allow CircleCI to hit massive scale.

Organizations these days try many things to move faster, from adopting lean and DevOps approaches to moving to the cloud to working weekends. Many organizations realize that increasing velocity is about more than just moving a bit faster. Gregor Hohpe explores the fundamentally different mind-set it takes—one that looks at the first derivative.

Around 2017, Antonio Jimenez and Pedro Martos embarked on an ambitious journey: to redefine one of the company's most mission-critical, most complex products from scratch. Join them as they explore how you can achieve an evolutionary architecture from solid foundations such as microservices architecture within a continuous delivery pipeline.

N26 has a mission to build the bank the world loves to use. Join Kat Liu on a journey into how N26 designed, managed, and deployed its platform of services into new regions in preparation for bringing its product global.

Eltjo Poort is here to help you figure out if you've struck the right balance between architecture and agile working. Eltjo explores how to measure agile architecture maturity and applied the model to help teams get more value out of their architecture function. You might recognize some of the behavior patterns.

Byron Berrisford explains why serverless containers are the future of containers infrastructure. Matching and scaling the right infrastructure to ever-changing microservices deployments is a challenge. Byron explores the evolution of containers autoscaling in Kubernetes, discusses the trade-offs, and introduces a new approach to deploy serverless containers in a "nodeless" cluster.

Many of the worst problems in distributed systems concern the need for coordination across nodes. But thinking local can help you avoid many of these problems. Drawing on the lessons he’s learned working on Wallaroo, John Mumm outlines strategies for avoiding coordination and relying on local knowledge.

Mario-Leander Reimer guides you through cloud native API gateways. Good APIs are the centerpiece of any successful digital product, with proper management of the utmost importance. The API gateway pattern is well established to handle concerns like routing, versioning, rate limiting, access control, or diagnosability in a microservice architecture.

Many organizations strive to establish independent, autonomous development teams. The goal is to achieve speed, scalability, and empowerment—but you have to decide what architecture governance looks like in a decentralized setup. Birgitta Boeckeler explores architecture principles as a way to avoid chaos, providing lessons about using them to walk the line between hard rules and helpful guidance.

Ubiquitous APIs and ever-growing distributed systems brought major challenges with complexity and discovery, which can no longer be overcome by hiring more people. We need to architect our systems differently. Enter autonomous APIs. Zdenek Nemec explores the problems with the complexity of forming API landscapes and proposes the autonomy of the components as the solution.

"It's just semantics." Semantics is all about meaning. If there's one thing we struggle with and need to get better at, it's the search for and clarification of meaning. Kevlin Henney explores how the very act of software development is an exercise in meaning—its discovery, its formulation, its communication. Paradigms, processes, and practices are anchored in ways of arriving at meaning.

Engin Yöyen explores how to build a distributed system with the collaboration of hundreds of people worldwide with dozens of integrations and millions of users. The eBay Classified Group is building a leading online platform that's adaptable to requirements of marketplaces all around the world. But the company needs to decide how to tackle the complexity to make the right architectural decisions.

Event-driven architectures enable nicely decoupled microservices. However, using peer-to-peer event chains to implement complex end-to-end logic crossing service boundaries can accidentally increase coupling. Bernd Rücker shares real-life experiences on how (micro-)services can collaborate and how to balance orchestration and choreography.

Events are our industry’s near and dear. All technological conferences are full of talks on event sourcing, event-driven architectures, or event-driven integrations. Vladik Khononov adds another one, but a bit different. Let’s talk about the dark side of this pattern—the cases in which events turn into an anti-pattern, how to identify them, and, of course, how to turn the project around.

Pini Reznik shares a story drawn from real-world migration projects that demonstrates a transformation design and reveals related patterns, including failures along the way. By the end, it establishes a full pattern language.

Data science, machine learning, and data manipulation and preparation are all core components of a future, trendy, world of software engineering. Many of these are built with "quick hacks," tiny scripts, or based on pipelines that are cobbled together from multiple components, frameworks, and the like. Mars Geldard and Paris Buttfield-Addison explore if software architecture matters to this world.

Rufus Raghunath and Giamir Buoncristiani apply the principles of evolutionary architecture to UI, first described by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua. Neal's a colleague of theirs and has been kind enough to review their content, so they share an authentic look at how frontend engineering can benefit from this progressive approach to architecture.

Vladik Khononov explains how he and his team embraced domain-driven design (DDD) at Plexop, a large-scale marketing system that spans over a dozen different business domains. Join in to learn how DDD allowed the team to manage business complexities, see what worked (and what didn't), and discover where they had to adapt the DDD methodology to fit the company's needs.

Everyone doing large-scale software delivery is using domain-driven design (DDD) these days, because it holds the key to delivering maintainable, evolvable solutions with independent teams. But it can go wrong, and then DDD is blamed. Andrew Harmel-Law and Gayathri Thiyagarajan detail a real project they saw fail. You'll learn the many problems they spotted and how they fixed them.

React is a hugely popular frontend framework that revolutionized the frontend development world. React is built primarily for the browser, while Node has fundamentally different operational constraints to the browser. David Clements demonstrates a very simple solution that can be dropped into preexisting React applications to significantly improve server-side rendering throughput.

The digitalization of society impacts companies that have to shift from a product-centered business model to a customer-centric one. Céline Lescop explains why, for AXA, proposing a range of products and services across many geographies means leveraging data beyond organizational and IT silos to enable personalized interactions and services while respecting regulatory and market expectations.

Join other attendees during lunch at Software Architecture to share ideas, talk about the issues of the day, and maybe solve a few problems. If you aren’t sure which topic to pick, don’t worry—it's not a long-term commitment. Try two or three and settle on a different one tomorrow.

Join us in the Expo Hall for drinks and food at the Expo Hall Reception.

Program chairs Chris Guzikowski and Neal Ford open the first day of keynotes.

Brian Sletten takes a deep dive into the intersection of data, models, hardware, language, and architecture as it relates to machine learning systems in particular, but the overall industry in general.

Zhamak Dehghani examines her observations and insights from working with many organizations that are busy developing their next-generation centralized data platforms. She explores the failure modes of a centralized paradigm of a data lake or its predecessor, the data warehouse.

Keynote by Cheryl Hung

Program chairs Chris Guzikowski and Neal Ford close the second day of keynotes.

Ignite is happening at Software Architecture. Join us for a fun, high-energy evening of five-minute talks—all aspiring to live up to the Ignite motto: Enlighten us, but make it quick.

Jumpstart your networking at Software Architecture by coming to Speed Networking before the keynotes begin. Bring your business cards and prepare a minute of chitchat about yourself, your projects, and your interests.