@ita_vienna Gave talk about Scalability at JSUG.AT

Hi there,

This past Monday I gave a talk at the Java Student User Group Austria (jsug.at). I seldom had such a lively, enthusiastic, interested and curious crowd as an audience. In was fantastic! I covered 6 topics that are a must-be-considered before you start development. There are more, but I picked those that seemed most important for me:

• Build scalability into your design – it allows you to start small and adapt as load grows
• Short transactions keep a system scalable – think if strategies to keep your transactions short
• Asynchronous processing – keep threads short, and prevent peaks that paralyze your system
• Establish caching as pattern early in the project
• Pay attention to your data access, e.g. avoid chatty transactions, query tuning, query optimization, etc.
• It’s never just the software alone, i.e. take a holistic view at scalability

Click here to download slides (sjug.at-performance-and-scalability-16jan2012-mpichler.pdf)

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Regards,

Michael

Copyright © 2010-2012 Michael Pichler

@ita_vienna Very impressive Demo on Automization in the Cloud that shows what we talked about yesterday

This fits well to what we talked about in our first IT Architecture Circle meeting. We have heard about automation and industrialization, by way of (also internal) standardization. This demo shows how we can imagine what the yesterday presented concept looks like (and a possible glimpse at the future of computing…).

Click here to view video

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Regards,

Michael

Copyright © 2010-2012 Michael Pichler

Kicked off Community for IT Architects in Vienna, Austria (IT Architecture Circle Vienna) – Feel free to join!

A colleague of mine – Gottfried Luef – and I - Michael Pichler – kicked off a Community for IT Architects in Vienna, Austria this past week. The community’s name is “IT Architecture Circle Vienna“. The preparation took most of my time over the past few months, which is why I didn’t post here. It was a great success! We managed to have 30 attendees with this first event.

Our topic for this first meeting was Cloud Computing. We picked it as we didn’t know exactly who would attend, and what the attendees might be interested in. Generally our speaker gave

1. an introduction to cloud computing, described
2. how you can find out whether or not cloud is of interest to you, and
3. gave a few show-cases.

You can download the slides from the community blog (see below).
Our focus will be subjects for IT Architects. We are planning to meet on a regular basis and talk about subjects that are of interest to the community. Anything will be of interest, be it now subjects for Enterprise Architects of subjects for Software Architects.

Our Blog is at: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/itavienna/?lang=en . Our Twitter channel is @ita_vienna . We are planning on posting on a regular basis.

Feel free to join us if you happen to live in Vienna, and are interested in IT Architecture. We are going to post relevant information to the blog as well as the twitter channel.

Regards,
Michael

Bad Performance – Meaningful assessment of response-time data

I published on article on evaluating response time measurements for the September 2011 issue of “Javamagazin”. It is in German and available in print only (for reference, please follow the link http://it-republik.de/jaxenter/java-magazin-ausgaben/Enterprise-Javascript-000463.html).

Often we start performance improvements much too late in projects. This article explains how important it is to measure the response times of your software – already throughout development, and how you can create meaningful information out of the data gathered. In particular this means:

• Establishing clusters of services/functions with excellent, very good, good and bad performance
• Recognizing trends of potentially bad performance, i.e. services/functions that are performing well but show signs of performance issues
• I packed the entire approach into a six repeatable steps, which can – most importantly – also get automated if you wish – for example – to embed them into your continuous build and deployment process

Copyright © 2011 Michael Pichler

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This is also a commonly found and essential pattern in today’s IT world. It is an enhancement of the pattern “Single Node Deployment Configuration for Multi-Tier Network-Centric Software Applications” covered in a previous entry.

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