Part Five: The Brave New World

Parts I through IV of this book have dealt with the technical, organizational, and business perspectives on software architecture. In this part, we turn our attention to emerging technologies. We have often been asked whether principles or technology is more important, and the answer, of course, is “Yes, they are both important.” Principles have a long lifetime; technology that affects architects tends to change every decade or so. In this part, we provide brief introductions to two technologies that we believe will last and have a significant impact on architects—the cloud and the edge. We also discuss one of the continuing problems of many architects: How do I get my organization to embrace architectural principles?

The cloud provides you with the option of outsourcing your data center. The vision is that computing resources are available to an application as electricity is available to a consumer. That is, one plugs in an appliance and electricity is available. In data center terms, you hook your web browser up to an application and computation power is available. All of the capacity, management, and operational issues of a data center are taken care of by a third party, and all you, as an architect, need to do is to utilize the resources you need. This trend has been accompanied by a vast expansion of the amount of data that organizations manage. Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and the other web giants all must manage petabytes of data. In Chapter 26, we provide a brief introduction to the technologies associated with the cloud and with managing these vast amounts of data.

Cloud computing is associated with the world of social networks and open source. The term “edge-periphery” is used to describe both the crowdsource and the open source movements. The term refers simultaneously to crowdsourced systems such as Facebook and Wikipedia and open source systems such as the Apache Web Server and Hadoop. In Chapter 27, we describe this phenomenon and explore some of the architectural implications of this aspect of the brave new world.

We end by discussing “adoption.” It describes an approach to dealing with the following problem: “OK, you guys have convinced me. Now I need to convince my organization of the importance of architectural principles. How do I do that?”