Kirk Knoernschild

Agility Through Modular Architectures - From Modular Monoliths to Microservices

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

No single architectural style solves all needs. Though microservices have taken the developer community by storm recently, they are not always the optimal solution. In some cases, a more monolithic architecture may be more suitable short term. Or perhaps a more traditional system of web services that allow you to leverage existing infrastructure investment is preferable. Fortunately, proven architectural practices allow you to build software that transcends specific architectural alternatives and develop a software system that gives the development team the agility to shift between different architectural styles without undergoing a time-consuming, costly, and resource intensive refactoring effort. Modularity is the cornerstone of these alternatives.

In this workshop, we will examine the benefits and drawbacks of several different modular architecture alternatives and we’ll explore the infrastructure, skills, and practices necessary to build software with each of these alternatives. There will be straightforward exercises and demonstrations that show the alternatives and how to create software that provides the architectural agility to easily shift between architectural alternatives.

Topics discussed include:

• Defining architectural agility
• Dissecting the monolith
• Exploring microservices
• Other architectural alternatives, including traditional web services
• Development infrastructure requirements
• Measuring architectural integrity

Agile Architecture

Tuesday, 8:30 AM EST

Traditional approaches to software architecture do not address the core tenet of all agile practices - feedback! We make many of the most important architectural decisions early in the development lifecycle and fail to get accurate feedback on those decisions throughout implementation. Compounding the problem? Agile methods offer no architectural advice. This session explores several architectural practices that help increase architectural agility.

What’s the goal of architecture? To serve as a blueprint of the system that everyone understands? Possess the flexibility to evolve as new requirements emerge? To satisfy the architectural qualities, including performance, security, availability, reliability, and scalability? Yes. Yes. Yes. At the heart of these three questions are the three pillars of architecture - social, process, and structure. But how do we create software architectures that achieves all of these goals? And how do we ensure no disconnect occurs between developers responsible for implementation and architects responsible for the vision? In this session, we’ll explore several principles to increase architectural agility and provide some actionable advice that will help you get started immediately.

From Mono to Micro - A Demonstration of Architectural Agility

Tuesday, 10:30 AM EST

Recently, microservices have take the development community by storm. Though a modern architectural paradigm, the underlying principles of microservices are embedded across many proven traditional architectural approaches, especially modularity. At the end of the day, microservices are just one way to the increase modularity of our software system. But there are others.

In this session we will examine several different ways to modularize large software systems. We'll start with the “modular monolith” and demonstrate how this modular monolith gives us a significant degree of architectural agility to evolve the architecture to microservices by incrementally breaking pieces of the application off and deploying them as microservices.

Java Micro Frameworks for Microservices

Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST

Microservice architecture is a modern architectural approach that focuses on breaking apart the monolith and building modular services. But the framework we use has a tremendous impact on how we build and deploy services. A new type of framework has emerged that provides a lightweight stack for building microservices.

In this session, we will explore some modern Java micro frameworks for building microservices. Example frameworks you may see include Dropwizard, Spark, Ninja, RestExpress, Play, Restlet, and RestX.

Building 12 Factor Apps with Java

Tuesday, 3:15 PM EST

The way we build and deliver software is changing. We must deliver software more quickly than ever before and traditional approaches to software architecture, infrastructure and methodology do not allow us to meet demand. We’ve reached the limits of agility through process improvement alone, and further increases demand we focus on improving architecture, infrastructure, and methodology simultaneously. 12 Factor is an app development methodology for building modern apps in the modern era.

Building modern apps requires modern methods and 12 Factor is an app development methodology that helps development teams build software by emphasizing development practices that meld together modern architectural paradigms with agile practices like continuous delivery for deployment to cloud platforms. In this session, we’ll examine the 12 Factors and explore how to apply them to apps built using Java.

Migrating to Java 9 - Jigsaw's Architectural Impact

Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST

Java 9 with the Jigsaw module system is here. In this session, we'll explore the basics of the Jigsaw module system and examine the impact it will have on how we build Java applications. We will dig into it's major features, including dependency management and Jigsaw services. Once we understand Jigsaw's basics, we will explore what it's going to take to migrate existing Java application to Java 9 and leverage Jigsaw.

Jigsaw's impact stands to be consequential. Jigsaw will restrict application code from accessing non-published JDK classes (ie. sun.com), require you to be explicit in declaring your dependencies, and more. We will explore Jigsaw basics and then dig into the impact Jigsaw will have on migrating existing Java applications to Java 9.