One of the most significant enablers of IT and software automation has been the shift away from fixed infrastructure to flexible infrastructure. Virtualization, process isolation, resource sharing and other forms of flexible infrastructure have been in use for many decades in IT systems. It can be seen in early Unix systems, Java application servers and… Continue reading
Posts tagged abstraction
Do Humans or Machines consume IaaS (REST API)
Infrastructure as a Service, like OpenStack and AWS, have made it possible to consume infrastructure on demand. It’s important to understand the ways in which both humans and machines interact with IaaS offerings in order to design optimal systems that leverage all possible automation opportunities. I drew the diagram below to help illustrate. Everything is… Continue reading
Microservices are not as new as you think
All around me architects and business managers are beginning to mandate that internal software applications be built (and sometimes rebuilt) as microservices so that we can reuse them and compose applications more quickly. I do admit that the idea of a curated catalog of well designed microservices is attractive. Contrary to all the buzz that… Continue reading
WordPress plugin licensing: Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2
In the introduction to this series, I outlined some of the requirements for the WordPress plugin licensing platform: Speed, reliability and scalability. These are critical. Just imagine what would happen if any of those were missing. Requirements Justification A slow platform might result in significantly fewer sales. One of our use cases is to provide… Continue reading