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
Category Archives: API
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
Software Monoliths
Companies need to modernize software and engineering to scale to reach new customers. Many find it increasingly hard to deliver outcomes safer and faster in a rapidly changing business ecosystem because of internal complexity from existing practices, systems and integrations. One cause is “shared” collaboration of resources between teams and in this post we explore these monoliths and monolithic practices More
Domain Service Design and Patterns
Domain services implement core logic for a business domain and are a relied upon by experience and consumer services. Domain services can be self contained and store the business logic and state or rely on an external provider system (translating from a “raw system format” to a “canonical” domain format) In this post we look…More
Building strategic public and partner API experience: The power of experience adapter and an abstraction layer
As organisations look to take their offerings to the world outside for specific customers, partners or general public and grow their business, they must balance the risk of opening the door to internal mission-critical systems vs value provided. These offerings also must deliver the right experience, requiring an abstraction over the internal organisation services to…More
Salesforce Integration: Context and Patterns
Integrating with Salesforce be in a Marketing or Customer management context is the norm these days. Salesforce offers a lot of flexibility for information exchange, storage and for capturing events on change This post lists the interaction patterns we observe with Salesforce, the usage contexts, issues and best-practise Salesforce Inbound Patterns How do we create…More
Common Service Caching Patterns
Caché implies to hide something. In a technology context this is “some service hides some data for a period of time (minutes to years)” A cache is a bit of information we stash away to better serve the clients using our service. Some of the questions cache implementers face are: Cache expiry and invalidation Mechanism…More
The difference between Open APIs and an Open API Specification
RESTful APIs can be internal (your company’s only) or public facing (Twitter). Thus internal APIs are called “Private APIs” and open to the public APIs are called “Open APIs” Now, while building an API accelerator for our clients I was asked by a well meaning colleague if this was an Open API; the intent was…More
Identifying and Computing hidden complexity within your distributed systems: Integration Entropy is like Molasses
Hello! This one is going to be short and less formal a post. I want to get these questions out there before they eluded me and then come back later to this post (or another) and answer some of these I have been thinking about how we are putting out more integrated solutions now than…More
From Project to Product Teams: Implementing the Inverse Conway Move for better Software
Modern software engineering techniques within organisations deliver “distributed features” using agile techniques. These features are distributed across different systems and integrated to provide an end-to-end experience. Traditional project delivery brings in members from different system oriented teams to deliver these features in a loose and ad-hoc fashion and dis-bands the team after a project is…More
Domains, Sub-Domains and Bounded Contexts: Explained with example from industry
The Domain Driven Design (DDD) book and community use the language of Domains and Bounded Contexts. Often there is confusion around what is a Domain, Sub-Domain, Bounded Context and how do we tell the difference between one or other when we are in the trenches. This confusion can lead to poor design where our domain…More
Observations in building Domain oriented services: How to think about building the right service for your enterprise
APIs are the abstractions over technical services. Good APIs mirror strategic thinking in an organisation and lead to better customer experience by enabling high-degree of connectivity via secure mechanisms Too much focus is on writing protocols & semantics with the desire to design good APIs and too little on business objectives. Not enough questions are…More
A Pandemic, Open APIs and Citizen Science: Its 2020 baby!
Human societies have been hit by pandemics through the ages and relied on the central governing authorities to manage the crisis and disseminate information. I believe this time around with COVID-19, our societies have access to more information from our governments because we have the internet If this pandemic is an evolutionary challenge, then our…More
Microservices for orchestration: How to apply the stateful process adapter pattern
What are stateful microservices? Microservices holding state while performing some longer-than-normal execution time type tasks. They have the following characteristics They have an API to start a new instance and an API to read the current state of a given instance They orchestrate a bunch of actions that may be part of a single end-to-end…More
History of web services: Monolith to Microservices
If you have struggled with decisions when designing APIs or Microservices – it is best to take a step back and look at how we got here. It helps not only renew our appreciation for the rapid changes we have seen over the past 10-20 years but also puts into perspective why we do what…More
De-mystifying the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) landscape: Actors, terminology, cadence and protocols
Any form of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) [1] work for data synchronization, digital transformation or customer self-service web implementation involves communication between the service providers and service consumers. A web of connections grows over time between systems, facilitated by tools specialising in “system-integration”; this article covers how the clients, services and integration tools communicate and…More
Tackling complexity: Using Process maps to improve visibility of integrated system features
“Entropy always increases “– second law of thermodynamics Enterprise systems are similar to isolated physical systems, where the entropy or hidden-information always increases. As the business grows, our technology footprint grows as new systems are implemented, new products and cross-functional features are imagined and an amazing network of integrations emerge Knowing how information flows and…More
Design-first API Contracts: Key to accelerating Integration and Improving API Quality
Service specifications along with developer documentation are key to turning your APIs into products. A well written and standards based API contract can not only make it faster and easier to integrate but also to test and deliver a solution faster Good API contracts help improve key software delivery metrics such as lead time through…More
System Integration Engineer’s Observation from the trenches
A general transition has been happening with the nature of work that I do in the integration space … we have been doing less of SOAP/XML/RPC webservices and more RESTful APIs for “digital enablement” of enterprise services . This brought a paradigm shift and valuable lessons were learnt (rightly or wrongly) … and of course the process of…More
Microservices with Docker and Spring Boot
This guide is for someone interesting in quickly building a micro-service using the Spring Boot framework. Works great if you have prior JAX-RS / Jersey experience Step-by-step guide Add the steps involved: Create a Maven Project Final Structure Pom ( Attached here ) Include Spring Boot Dependencies in your pom Parent Project <parent> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>…More