Schedule: Overview sessions

Decentralization is often touted as an intrinsic good architecturally. While it's possible to benefit from decentralized thinking, it's also very easy to misfit the solution to the problems at hand. Join Brian Sletten to explore the major decentralized approaches and their applicability to specific problems. Read more.

As more companies embrace digital technology as core to their operation, it's essential that we architects develop our leadership skills to be equal to our technical skills. Join Seth Dobbs to learn how to guide business decisions and align technology with broad strategy while also motivating your teams and ensuring their success. Read more.

Every software system has an architecture. Many are little more than the result of circumstances, rather than deliberate decisions. Helping teams think about software architecture is a key to helping them grow well. James Thompson demonstrates how to assess approaches and make decisions based on what matters to your team and your projects. Read more.

The lines between static and dynamic content are blurred, and it’s more difficult than ever to choose the right technologies for your requirements and budget. John Chapin takes you on a step-by-step journey from hosting static content on AWS S3 to deploying dynamic, complex business logic mere milliseconds away from your users with AWS CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, and more. Read more.

As fans of serverless and event-driven architectures, Kenny Baas-Schwegler and Marc Duiker wanted to see how easy it was to create a serverless application in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—specifically, by comparing how easy it is to orchestrate functions, using a current car park management example solution. Join them to learn the pros and cons of each cloud vendor. Read more.

Kubernetes is catching on like wildfire. But as organizations move to this new platform, they end up with legacy applications that don’t take advantage of everything Kubernetes has to offer—or worse, with applications that don’t work at all. Aaron Schlesinger shares an “Elements of Kubernetes” guide that details patterns to ensure your application fits into the Kubernetes platform. Read more.

Jonny LeRoy details two architectural failure modes: hierarchical command and control from ivory tower architects with strict approvals and rigorous control gates, and chaos with every team doing whatever they want with close to zero governance. Jonny then explores the "Goldilocks" zone that ensures organizational risks and opportunities are handled while giving teams as much autonomy as possible. Read more.

Architects in large enterprises are often seen as ivory tower residents far detached from reality. Large-scale IT transformation across a vast inventory of applications and business units puts an entirely different and much more exciting spin on enterprise architecture. Gregor Hohpe takes a serious but lighthearted look at the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations. Read more.

Mike Amundsen walks you through building adaptable microservices that take advantage of the features of REST. You’ll learn how to design services that advertise themselves to the network, discover their own “partner” services, and can adapt to subtle changes to existing services without relying only on recode-and-redeploy patterns for maintaining overall system operation. Read more.

Robert Lefkowitz offers an overview of technical debt, explaining how to recognize it, how to prevent or reduce it, and why there is so much of it. Read more.

Modern content "management" systems are as conceptually challenging as they are technically difficult. Architecting them isn’t (strictly) AWS configuring or software solutioning now. The work requires an evolution from strategic planning to collaborative strategic thinking. Diana Montalion explores "archistructure": enabling everyone to engage with the parts through the lens of the whole. Read more.

How do you develop great architects on your team? It's a real challenge when your organization offers limited opportunities to actually perform as an architect. Jean Bordelon shares 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. Read more.

Being a successful architect requires more than just a good understanding of architecture. Patrick Kua explores the breadth of skills and experience an architect should focus on and outlines the balance of traits that makes a well-rounded architect. Read more.

As architects, we provide guiding principles as part of our architecture to enable decision making for unforeseen details, but we seldom develop guiding principles for ourselves as leaders and for how we interact with people. Seth Dobbs shares a core set of principles that will help you enable effective interactions with your team and your stakeholders. Read more.