Interesting news today about how Azure is becoming a platform for financial institutions using Blockchain technology. Blockchain is the concept underlying Bitcoin, that allows secure transfer of digital value.
Also an interesting fact buried in the article:
More than 80 percent of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers.
Hi there. Wanted to make a post today about my Udemy courses, and how you are able to get them at a discount using the links below.
I really appreciate all of my students, and I have created these courses to help pass these architecture exams. I am constantly improving them, and so they’ll never be out of date to the specific exam that they teach.
“Excellent content that covers the organization of TOGAF very well. Scott’s insights into the exam have been invaluable!” – Vinoo Palayoor
“I really appreciated the content and how the whole lectures and material is organized, the small quizzes and the outside material hyperlinks. Really helpful !” – Jean-Francois Pezet
I have over 21,000 students in my architecture courses, and I look forward to having you as a student.
Scott
Microsoft Azure ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ offer is now available in India data center region.
Good news if you live in India and want to run servers in India.
Source: Microsoft Azure ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ now available for India regions – MSPoweruser
Windows Azure Active Directory is described in cartoon format in this video. It’s an easy to follow sketch of all the major pieces and how you can use it. It also describes the differences between Windows Azure Active Directory and Windows Server Active Directory.
Source: What is Windows Azure Active Directory? | Windows Azure Active Directory | Channel 9
Azure Datacenter Virtual Tour. The coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. WTG Microsoft…
Check out the Azure Data Center
Another Azure Friday post from Channel 9 talking about Redis. This time, it’s improving security while using Redis and Azure.
Answering questions like, how can you ensure that the cache can only be accessed from a specific client and not publicly addressable?
Source: Azure Redis Security Caching | Azure Friday | Channel 9
A very interesting Azure Friday video on Redis.
In this video we will look at some of the best practices on how should you pick the right Redis Cache offering for your use case.
Source: Azure Redis Cache Best Practices | Azure Friday | Channel 9
The Open Group recently announced that they are switching from Prometric to Pearson VUE. For now, the TOGAF 9.1 exam is available at both testing centers (and in many cases, the same testing center supports both testing companies). But at some point in the future, the exams will only be available through Pearson.
The Open Group selects Pearson VUE for global computer-based IT certification testing programme delivery
Source: The Open Group :: Pearson VUE
Interesting Forbes article about Azure:
Azure, currently, is the only major cloud platform that is consistently ranked as a leader for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Source: A Close Look At Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, Part 1: Cloud Computing
A week or so ago, I ran a survey of the students in my architecture courses, asking them what their biggest challenges were.
In this post, we’ll look at the top 5 answers, from real working architects and senior application developers like you:
Without a doubt, as we get into the 40th year of having enterprise-level software systems, we’re all feeling a bit burdened by some of these pain-in-the-neck (and difficult to replace) systems.
In fact, as I look back on the last 10 years of my career, I can’t really think of a project that wasn’t something like these:
If I had a magic wand, and could update to the latest version, or replace it with something more modern instantly, for sure that magic wand would be used a lot. Unfortunately, company’s sometimes prioritize certain things very low on the list, and we have to deal with them.
Oh man. What is architecture? What IS it? What do architects DO?
This question has been haunting people in the architecture space for ages. I even made not one, but two videos about it. (Please check those out, and subscribe!)
The thing to remember is, every system has an architecture. Whether an architect was involved or not, one or more people made some decisions on systems design that add together to become the system architecture. But would you rather have something that is designed intentionally, or something that just comes together without forethought?
If I offered you a house, and said that I built it one room at a time without thinking about any of the other rooms, does that sound like a well-designed house? Then why can computer systems (and ultimately the businesses that run on top of them) be designed only one room at a time and expect the whole house to make sense?
(Why are there 3 bathrooms in the basement and none upstairs by the bedrooms? Because there was no architect.)
In 2016, security is a huge issue that anyone in technology has to deal with. Not only is it smart business policy to protect your customers data from being exposed, but it’s actually the law in many places that this data has to be responsibly protected. As architects, we need to be on top of the standards for security and ensure that our designs have thought about that before code has been written or systems set up.
Easier said than done, of course.
But from the way customer data is kept, to the way our networks are hardened from attack, to the limitations we place on users from outside (including the website user itself which will minimize the effects of a web-facing break in) are more important than ever, and will never be something we can take for granted.
Legacy systems were a big headache, but even interacting with non-legacy systems can be complex. How do you package and send GBs of sensitive data from one server to another when the other system only accepts XML files in a specific file directory as input? Sometimes you end up with middle-tier “connector” systems that just move files around, and sometimes you need to use third-party solutions like Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or Microsoft BizTalk to pass and manipulate data around.
The ideal solution is for two systems to be designed to talk to each other, or use some industry standard protocol (an Industry Architecture on the Enterprise Continuum!) so that related systems can just work to implement a standard instead of worrying about direct integration with so many varying systems. But those standards are often overly complex (due to the number of irrelevant-to-you scenarios they have to deal with) or don’t exist for your specific need.
We’ve all been there. Your company has been using “Tool X” for analytics and reporting so long that the code is everywhere. In every web page, of every website. Highly customized for button clicks, opt-ins, video plays, and all sorts of events. And implemented slightly differently in every site it’s been added to. When asked, you estimate 12 person-months to swap out the “Tool X” code and replace it with another solution to the same level of customization for pages and events.
Sometimes you’re stuck. The cost to replace something doesn’t give the business the necessary return on investment to spend that money. And so you go year after year, with a tool that no-one really likes, paying more for it than you probably should, because it’s tool difficult to replace.
There’s no easy solution to that, except to vow that the next time you’re asked to implement some custom third-party code in all your web pages, you devise a system that puts that code in one central location. You need to abstract that and centralize it, so that it’s easy to upgrade to the newest version or swap out to a new vendor.
Those were the top 5 issues identified by my students. Anything that I missed?
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