Engineering the Future of Software
Feb 25–26, 2018: Training
Feb 26–28, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Schedule: Application architecture sessions

Many current popular architectures are distributed (event-driven, microservices, and so on), but much of the world runs because of application architectures. The architecture of applications, encompassing desktop, web, and other cohesively coupled monoliths represents useful ways to solve many problems in the simplest way. While most conferences that have only an architecture track focus only on hot topics, architects still make important innovations in application architecture. Many accidental architects work within application architectures and need to know how to refactor, restructure, and improve their efforts. How can architects take applications and transition them to microservices or other service-based architectures? What trends are hot in application architecture and what’s coming next? How can architects create hybrid architectures that take advantages of both application and distributed architectures?

9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Hands-on
Average rating: ***..
(3.50, 8 ratings)
Jochem Schulenklopper and Gero Vermaas offer an overview of TIME, a well-known model for application portfolio management by Gartner, and cover some improvements to the model, including a process for determining business value of applications, a innovative method of measuring IT quality (from an architect's perspective), and tactics for improving the applications in an organization's IT landscape. Read more.
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Beekman Parlor
Secondary topics:  Hands-on
James Stewart (Jystewart.net)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 5 ratings)
Architects are often the ones making the decisions about how to build in the right security for systems while making systems usable and delivering them on time. James Stewart shares techniques for considering security of whole systems and explores ways of bringing together cross-disciplinary teams to collectively own secure designs. Read more.
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
Average rating: ***..
(3.86, 7 ratings)
A RESTful approach to microservices offers a number of benefits. Mike Amundsen walks you through building adaptable microservices that take advantage of the features of REST, including statelessness, self-description, and using hypermedia to discover and modify application state. Read more.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Case Study, Hands-on
Dean Wampler (Anyscale), Boris Lublinsky (Lightbend)
Average rating: **...
(2.33, 3 ratings)
Dean Wampler and Boris Lublinsky walk you through building several streaming microservices applications based on Kafka using Akka Streams and Kafka Streams for data processing. You'll explore the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, helping you choose the best tools for your needs, and contrast them with Spark Streaming and Flink, so you can determine when to choose them instead. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Overview
Jeremy Deane (Foundation Medicine)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 9 ratings)
There are inherent trade-offs that must be made in any software architecture. Some architectural trade-offs are obvious, such as performance versus security or availability versus consistency, while others are quite subtle such as resiliency versus affordability. Jeremy Deane explores a number of architectural trade-offs and offers strategies for dealing with them. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Allard Buijze (AxonIQ)
Average rating: ****.
(4.47, 15 ratings)
Most discussions about implementing microservices start by evaluating the technical options and their challenges. However, the real business value is in functionality. Allard Buijze demonstrates how to build evolutionary microservices, starting with a single application that can be scaled out and distributed once the sensible boundaries are known. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Georgios Gkekas (ING Bank)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 9 ratings)
Georgios Gkekas shares ING's advanced analytics journey to promote modern machine and deep learning techniques internally through a central, best-of-breed technical platform tailored for data science activities. The platform offers only the necessary automated tools to replace the tedious, repetitive, and error-prone steps in a typical data science pipeline. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Sutton North
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Average rating: **...
(2.30, 20 ratings)
A big part of microservices architecture is decomposing monolithic applications with tightly coupled data models, but moving to decentralized data management is one of the most challenging aspects of a microservices architecture. JP Morgenthal shares strategies for your redesign efforts, the possible pitfalls, and the trade-offs these approaches force architects and engineers to make. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Hands-on
Kai Wähner (Confluent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Kai Wähner shares a highly scalable, mission-critical infrastructure using Apache Kafka and Apache Mesos: Kafka brokers are used as the distributed messaging backbone; Kafka’s Streams API embeds stream processing into any external application without the need for a dedicated streaming cluster; and Mesos is used as a scalable infrastructure to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native platform. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Theoretical
Duncan DeVore (Lightbend)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)
Duncan DeVore discusses the ins and outs of dealing with modular JVM-based application consistency, distributed state, and identity coherence with techniques such as idempotency, eventual and casual consistency, the CAP theorem, single source of truth, and distributed domain design. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice
Michelle Brush (Cerner Corporation)
Average rating: ****.
(4.73, 11 ratings)
Our architectural decisions are both guided and judged by the things we choose to value and measure in our systems. Michelle Brush explains how to assess what aspects of the system different organizations should value and therefore constantly measure and shares approaches for measuring for accountability and improvement of those values in an architecture. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Regent
Secondary topics:  Anti-Pattern, Best Practice
Robert Lefkowitz (Warby Parker)
Average rating: ****.
(4.64, 11 ratings)
Robert Lefkowitz offers a overview of technical debt, explaining how to prevent or reduce it, when to increase it, and how to use refactoring to refinance it. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Overview
Stephen Pember (Toast)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 3 ratings)
Event storage offers many practical benefits to distributed systems providing complete state changes over time, but there are a number of challenges when building an event store mechanism. Stephen Pember explores some of the problems you may encounter and shares real-world patterns for working with event storage. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Beekman Parlor
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
James Siddle (Skyhook Consulting Ltd)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Software architecture can be beautiful, but business and engineering reality is often inconvenient and messy. James Siddle explains how living product roadmaps help you deal with reality without compromising your architecture vision. You’ll learn Agile roadmapping techniques and how to engage with stakeholders to move toward your architecture goals while avoiding wasteful endeavors. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Pratik Patel (IBM)
Average rating: ****.
(4.11, 9 ratings)
Single-page web apps are becoming increasingly popular, so it's important to understand the low-level and high-level aspects of the browser platform and JavaScript runtimes embedding in them. Pratik Patel dives deep into the performance aspects of JavaScript and the web browser, covering the best practices and techniques you need to tune your apps and tips for framework selection. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Theoretical
Viktor Klang (Lightbend)
Average rating: **...
(2.67, 3 ratings)
Viktor Klang offers a new take on enterprise integration patterns that builds on top of the Reactive Streams standard, an orchestration layer where transformations are standalone, composable, and reusable and—most importantly—use asynchronous flow-control (backpressure) to maintain predictable, stable behavior over time. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Suudhan Rangarajan (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 6 ratings)
As Netflix continues its journey beyond 100M members, the company is rearchitecting its critical Playback API service to better serve its business needs for the next three to five years. Suudhan Rangarajan discusses why and how Netflix rebuilt the Playback API service and outlines a rigorous framework that you can use to reason about your microservice architecture. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Case Study
Average rating: ***..
(3.83, 6 ratings)
Michael Bevilacqua-linn shares an architecture for a cloud-based end-to-end data infrastructure that handles everything from classic analytic use cases to real-time operational analysis to modern machine learning techniques in an elastically scaleable and secure manner. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Secondary topics:  Best Practice, Framework-focused
Marty Brodbeck (Shutterstock)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
In an effort to consolidate and modernize the company’s technology stack, Shutterstock recently embarked on a technology overhaul, which also led to organizational and cultural change. Marty Brodbeck shares some of the decisions Shutterstock made and the challenges it faced during this huge transformation, along with key principles that drove and guided the shift. Read more.