Recognising Software Monoliths: 7 key types

A monolith in software architecture a term used to describe some service that is large, complex and shared across different business functionalities. Changing any aspect of this can be daunting not just from an engineering standpoint but from a testing, delivery and release standpoint as well As teams look to decompose monolithic software into domain…More

3 Key Asynchronous Communication Patterns: Ways to talk offline

When integrating systems we often end-up writing asynchronous messaging interfaces for mostly system-to-system communications. This conversation technique is great because it does not require the sender and receiver to stay connected to each other in a session at the same instance in time, is non-blocking and you can make it reliable through message persistence, incremental…More

Domain Service Architecture: The good, bad and ugly

Domain services implement core logic for a business domain and are a relied upon by experience and consumer services. Domain services can be self contained and store the business logic and state or rely on an external provider system (translating from a “raw system format” to a “canonical” domain format) In this post we look…More

Why Experience APIs are key to taking your business public

As organisations look to take their offerings to the world outside for specific customers, partners or general public and grow their business, they must balance the risk of opening the door to internal mission-critical systems vs value provided. These offerings also must deliver the right experience, requiring an abstraction over the internal organisation services to…More

Salesforce Integration: Context and Patterns

Integrating with Salesforce be in a Marketing or Customer management context is the norm these days. Salesforce offers a lot of flexibility for information exchange, storage and for capturing events on change This post lists the interaction patterns we observe with Salesforce, the usage contexts, issues and best-practise Salesforce Inbound Patterns How do we create…More

How to build APIs with the right abstraction: Lessons in being less leaky

Leaky abstractions can be bad, especially in the context of APIs we expose to the world. Here are some thoughts on how to be less leaky and achieve more self-service with the APIs you build Modern software is built over the network with systems hooked-up either privately within the internal enterprise eco-system or with a…More

Common Service Caching Patterns

Caché implies to hide something. In a technology context this is “some service hides some data for a period of time (minutes to years)” A cache is a bit of information we stash away to better serve the clients using our service. Some of the questions cache implementers face are: Cache expiry and invalidation Mechanism…More

The difference between Open APIs and an Open API Specification

RESTful APIs can be internal (your company’s only) or public facing (Twitter). Thus internal APIs are called “Private APIs” and open to the public APIs are called “Open APIs” Now, while building an API accelerator for our clients I was asked by a well meaning colleague if this was an Open API; the intent was…More

From Project to Product Teams: Implementing the Inverse Conway Move for better Software

Modern software engineering techniques within organisations deliver “distributed features” using agile techniques. These features are distributed across different systems and integrated to provide an end-to-end experience. Traditional project delivery brings in  members from different system oriented teams to deliver these features in a loose and ad-hoc fashion and dis-bands the team after a project is…More

Domains and Bounded Contexts: Examples from the industry

The Domain Driven Design (DDD) book and community use the language of Domains and Bounded Contexts. Often there is confusion around what is a Domain, Sub-Domain, Bounded Context and how do we tell the difference between one or other when we are in the trenches. This confusion can lead to poor design where our domain…More

A Pandemic, Open APIs and Citizen Science: Its 2020 baby!

Human societies have been hit by pandemics through the ages and relied on the central governing authorities to manage the crisis and disseminate information. I believe this time around with COVID-19, our societies have access to more information from our governments because we have the internet If this pandemic is an evolutionary challenge, then our…More

History of web services: Monolith to Microservices

If you have struggled with decisions when designing APIs or Microservices – it is best to take a step back and look at how we got here. It helps not only renew our appreciation for the rapid changes we have seen over the past 10-20 years but also puts into perspective why we do what…More

De-mystifying the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) landscape: Actors, terminology, cadence and protocols

Any form of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) [1] work for data synchronization,  digital transformation or customer self-service web implementation involves communication between the service providers and service consumers. A web of connections grows over time between systems, facilitated by tools specialising in “system-integration”; this article covers how the clients, services and integration tools communicate and…More

Tackling complexity: Using Process maps to improve visibility of integrated system features

“Entropy always increases “– second law of thermodynamics Enterprise systems are similar to isolated physical systems, where the entropy or hidden-information always increases. As the business grows, our technology footprint grows as new systems are implemented, new products and cross-functional features are imagined and an amazing network of integrations emerge Knowing how information flows and…More