10/2020 Flashcards
(31 cards)
Considerations in IT that drive descisions
- New developments in IT
- Capabilities of a Technology
- Stability and maturity
- Architectural fit
- Availability of Skills
- Attractiveness of a technology
Considerations of managing capabilities of a technology
One Technology Solution covering all/most requirements:
(+) Only one technology and one supplier
(-) More complex technology
(-) Less fit with individual set of requirements
(-) stronger dependence on supplier
Different, specific technology solutions for each set of requirements
(+) close fit with each individual set of requirement
(+) each technology solution likely simpler
(+) less dependence on single supplier
(-) multiple technologies and multiple suppliers
(-) new internal decision for each project which technology solution to use
How do the views of IT Managers & IT staff differ on technology choice
IT Management tends to prefer One Technology solution (all in one):
(+) less solution & suppliers to manage
(+) simpler decision making internally & enforcement once established
(-) more difficult & controversial to choose intitially
(-) stronger dependence
IT Statt tends to prefere specific technology solutions (best of breed)
(+) solution more tailored to problem at hand
(+) less to learn
(+) less to coordinate
(-) only relevant in this field, little use if I move elsewhere
Potential issues regarding stability and maturitiy (product-view / supplier-view)
Product
- product does not work properly -> costs, rejections by users, other outages
Supplier
- suppliers does not deliver -> product is not usable (see above)
stability and maturity give the organisation at least 5 assets
1) Brand recognition
2) market leadership/share
3) IT research company assessments
4) proof of concept projects
5) references
Self-reinforcing cycle of adoption
More users/customers = more references = more market share/coverage/recognition
What are corollaries of network effect/plattform business
- In ever technology field, there is a strong drive towards an oligopoly
- Dominating products tend to be technically outdated
How can you “trick the system” of network effeckt?
- leveraging the company brand for overselling
- using the brand of a successful product to sell another product
Corollary: how to be successful with a new it product
MVP -> First references/lighthouse projects/rapid scale-up/growth into neighboring fields
for B2B it is hard to get early adopters as first references
(New) Troubles in IT Product Markets
- Suppliers changing their business model from software provider to service provider
- Customers being sued by 3rd party patent holders
Four broad types of open source
- Hobbyist
- Academic
- Professional (Google Android)
- Sponsored (Mozilla)
OSS helps to estalibh a standard for the industrie
So it can be attractive even for Profit-Oriented organisations
Purpose of Architecture
- Overview for stakeholder
- landscape to know how doing things
- helps design decisions
- increase agility by helping scale
pitfalls of Architecture
not doing enough vs doing too much:
- too little: re-documenting every time
- too much: ignored & confusing
good practice of Architecture
based on business needs & adopt a federated architecture organization
Modularization as a driver of the future of IT
a bad modularization is, when you need too much people to coordinate because the modules are not autonom - good modularization limites depencencies (see MITS-Matrix vs. SAFe ART)
Good modularization can turn bad
This is when the logic changes and the requirements are not orthogonal through the previously autonom stacks
Microservice architecture is a variant of the service-oriented architecture. It arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled services
Modularization by business capability, clear stable interface, fine granular, almost complete freedom in how services are implemented
Advantages of a microservice architecture
- New versions of a service can be designed, implemented, tested, and deployed independently
- Each service can have its own internal architecture & technology standards
- Individual services can be offered to 3rd parties
- 3rd party services can be integrated easily
Critique of microservice architectures
- Benefits are not unique to microservice architectures but a result of how well the modularization was done
- fine granularity can easily lead to performance problems & changes to many services
- Advantages in scalability only if application parallelizable and microservice overhead not to large
Assessment of microservices architectures
- Can increase flexibility/agility under the right circumstances
- can enable use of 3rd party services
- can enable providing of own services to 3rd parties
but not a one-size-fits-all solution:
- do not solve management of dependencies, but rather shift it
- are known to be hard to test and debug
- easily run into performance problems
The bigger the system the more it is necessary to build more functionality
the productivity decreases with complexity (which is another reason for microservices
Virtual Machine
Environment that looks like a computer (CPU, memory, disk, network), but is only a slice of a physical machine; it allows to split a physical server into multiple machines both by component and by time (e.g. VMware)
Container
light-weight virtualization sharing the operating system kernel between “machines”; lower isolation/protection between containers compared to virtual machines, but less overhead (e.g. Dockers)
