I am currently in Panama City Panama for the first International Symposium on Software Architecture and Patterns. It is being held in conjunction with the tenth Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology. I was on the Planning Committee for the convention this year and I have been asked to give a keynote address.
The following is a description of my keynote address which is entitled "When Should You Consider Meta-Architectures? Using Meta to Scale the Cloud."
The recent surge in cloud computing has really changed the way architectures are evolving. Platforms as a Service (PAAS) and Software as a Service (SAAS) is becoming where organizations can get necessary resources as needed without having to worry about many hardware and software configuration issues. It is no longer the case that systems need to be isolated to a single platform or set of platforms with a lot’s of possible maintenance issues. The core premise with the cloud is that different resources including services can be allocated and integrated as needed, adapting to the specific needs of the organization or systems being built.
Additionally, “Cloud Computing” allows for a large numbers of users and flexibility for different services being provided. Different types of resources and services provide maximum configuration and flexibility within the cloud and metadata is key for this type of variability. , It is quite often the case that cloud applications need to be able to dynamically adapt at runtime, without stopping the application. It is important to provide a way for users to customize their own experience with cloud applications. Trying to do this without ways for users to describe and adapt to their specific needs will not scale at all. This scaling and adaptability problem becomes even more imperative when you have many different organizations with different requirements. If, in the cloud, these organizations cannot adapt and define their different needs, the cloud solution would not be that compelling to them. In these situations, it is important to allow the ability for different customizations of the services, and to allow the users themselves to dynamically configure the systems. In order to be able to adapt to these dynamic requirements, the demand for Meta-architectures, such as those provided by Cloud solutions such as SalesForce, are necessary to make these types of adaptability possible!
What does it take to build a system that can be changed and adapted without programming? When is it appropriate to consider stepping into the meta world to build such an extensible system specifically in the “Cloud” environment? This talk answers these questions and presents ideas about using meta-architecture to scale in the “Cloud”.
I am also leading a BootCamp that focuses on teaching the principals of writing and being a part of the patterns community.
This is my first time to Panama and have enjoyed seeing the sites and taking many photos of the Panama Canal, Old City Ruins and the old city, which was rebuilt after the city was burned down by pirates in the early 1600's!
Panama is very modern now with huge growth and growing economy.