Author Archives: alokmishra

Alok brings experience in engineering and architecting distributed software systems from over 20 years across industry and consulting. His posts focus on Systems Integration, API design, Microservices and Event driven systems, Modern Enterprise Architecture and other related topics

Accelerate Complex Delivery with Platform APIs & Orchestration

Enterprise integration solutions these days tend to span multiple platforms across Cloud and On-Premise locations to deliver large complex programs. The management of these platforms needs to be fast, precise and continuous to ensure there are no bottlenecks to delivery as the solution development flows through its lifecycle This means creating environments across multiple platforms,…More

Strategic DDD Outcomes: Top Domain model to Team Topologies

Over the past couple of years, I have been working with architecture and engineering teams to teach and apply strategic and tactical domain driven design. I will come back with lessons learned in a future post, but this one covers the outcome of these teaching plus consulting engagements for strategic DDD Remember, strategic DDD is…More

10 steps to DevSecOps: Engineering your software better

My top-10 things to do when starting out on a project to improve code quality and security through DevSecOps About 7 years ago I was frustrated with the industry practices where it took us 6 months to provision environments, projects were delayed due to environment issues, manual deployments (UI based code uploads), long deployment times…More

Technology Service Modernization (Part I): 3 Approaches to Modernization

Welcome to 2022. While I was in a blogging hiatus, my time was spent closing out conversations with business and technology leaders looking to modernize their technology solutions as they were looking to adapt them new market needs and challenges. I thought Web3.0 was the big buzz word but it looks like Modernization is the…More

On Measuring Software Design

Good design leads to good engineering quality and products that are useful, fun to use, simple, efficient and safe. But what is a good design? Is it purely subjective and opinionated or are there specific attributes of a design that lend themselves to introspection and measurement? Why measure? Measuring helps us quantify something at a…More

Sustainability as a key Software Architecture Choice

As an architect my day-to-day involves helping my clients solve wicked problems while delighting their customers and staying profitable and sustainable as a business. I do this by obsessively reasoning about software architecture and design choices. As an architect circa 2021 growing climate crisis has me concerned especially as the software industry and the solutions…More

The Domain Stories Series: Search Story

A common story we often hear is related to searching for information. This is a powerful capability to provide through your technology services as the user is keen to interact with your offering and the richer and performant it is, the more value the consumer draws from this. Google it! When analysing the search story,…More

Domain Model != Data Model

One of the smells when practicing DDD (Domain Driven Design) is when you are presented with a Data Model (extracted from an existing set of tables or constructed through rigorous but confirmed hypotheses) and asked to consider this as your Domain Model Domain Model is not the same as a Data Model This is an…More

Business Services and APIs: 101

Business oriented service design and implementation is becoming increasing popular with organisations looking to move beyond traditional systems integration led services. This top-down approach needs to start with business domain owners and their processes, documenting the core and supporting business capabilities they present to their customers so that they can be analysed to produce technology…More

DDD Anti-patterns: 5 things we get wrong with Domain Driven Design in practice

As a software architect I have been using various design techniques including Domain Driven Design (DDD) which has been incredibly useful for building APIs and Microservices and for strategic architecture consulting engagements requiring discovery/mapping of socio-technical organisation structure and in documenting an API strategy I have also been training architects across organisations to understand and…More

How does having an API Catalogue accelerate Business Integration?

An API Catalogue is a view of your business products expressed as technical services as visible to internal and external consumers to facilitate fast and self-service integration to deliver richer value to end customers and deliver it faster An API Catalogue lets your customers view and interact with your product brouchre A catalogue item can…More

Mapping Business Capabilities to Services

One of the key questions around API strategy we get asked is how do we map business capabilities to services. An approach is to use domain driven design and build domain services, in this post we will look at what this looks like Capabilities Businesses domains offer capabilities. Given domains are classified into core, supporting…More

Iterative Domain Model Design: How to stay autonomous

One key question that I hear with Domain Modelling is how do you know if you have your transaction boundary right (so that you build the right aggregate)?  Hidden in this is another question – what if we got our domain aggregate wrong? We can take this further and ask In an agile world, given change…More

Ubiquitous Internet of Things: How ESP32s are changing the game

I have been tinkering with IoT devices for over 10 years now, starting with micro controllers with ethernet ports (later bulky wifi-shields) that were cumbersome to scale out and put onto things. For a true internet of things, we needed low-cost, connectivity enabled, sensor packed devices we would attach to things easily and then read…More

Domain Driven Design (DDD): Core concepts and Enterprise Architecture

If you are building or designing APIs, Microservices or integrating systems then Domain Driven Design (DDD) offers a valuable design technique for mapping business domains to build software services of value Using DDD is incredibly useful when designing services because it helps you rationalise the granularity of your software, the ownership boundaries and model interactions…More

Single view of Customer from Distributed Software: Part II

In the previous post we discussed how to identify some of the challenges around a single view of the customer. In this post we look at some of the ways we manage customer contacts in the enterprise systems and relate them to Domain Driven Design context mapping Patterns 1. Separate ways: We all have our…More