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2016/04/24
 
24 Apr, 2016 | 3 min read

Everything you need to know about architecture patterns: a quick reference for Solution Architects  

  • Zaithoon Bin Ahamed
  • Director Corporate Communications - WSO2

The success of a solutions architect depends on the approach taken from the beginning. The role can be challenging with the need to carefully balance the organization’s business as well as technical requirements. That’s why we had a dedicated track on architecture patterns at WSO2Con Asia 2016 held earlier this year  in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to help SAs understand today's best practices and how they can deliver value more quickly. If you missed out, here’s a recap of the patterns we discussed with the link to recordings of each talk.

Iterative Architecture: Your Path to On-Time Delivery

Agility is key for enterprises to optimize business functions, introduce new business capabilities, and explore new markets. Thus, enterprise software systems should support both evolutionary as well as revolutionary changes that will impact core business functions.

WSO2’s VP - Solutions Architecture, Asanka Abeysinghe, discussed the advantages of adopting an iterative approach when introducing architectural changes to support business and technical requirements. He demonstrates this with real-world examples of successful implementation of architectures in iterations. 

Breaking Down Silos with Service Oriented Architecture

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has outrun the notion of systems silos with its use of standard protocols and specifications at integration points, which allows systems to communicate with each other in a much more flexible manner. Nadeesha Gamage, associate lead - solutions engineering at WSO2, explained the drawbacks of having a siloed architecture and how they can be avoided by moving to SOA, thereby enabling greater agility. He discussed how SOA can be broken down further to a finer-grained microservice architecture and, as a result, how an enterprise can benefit using the WSO2 suite of products. 

Event Driven Architecture: Managing Business Dynamics for Adaptive Enterprise

SOA implements a synchronous request-response model to connect remote processes in distributed system; it creates an inherent rigidity and additional dependencies when applied in modelling business processes and workflows. In contrast, event driven architecture (EDA) is based on an asynchronous message-driven communication model to propagate information throughout an enterprise, thus supporting a more natural alignment with an enterprise’s operational model and processes/workflows. In this session, Solutions Architect at WSO2, Dassana Wijesekera, analyzes key business challenges that encourage the use of EDA and discusses a pragmatic approach of designing and implementing an EDA using the WSO2 integration framework.

Moulding Your Enterprise with Resource-Oriented Architecture

An enterprise environment is typically heterogeneous, often spanning across organizational boundaries. Building such systems require tools that promote intrinsic interoperability and provide ease of integrating over boundaries. It also needs to use technology that promotes simplicity and is easy to handle. Resource-oriented architecture (ROA) supports this by focusing on entities and interactions for effective enterprise integration. Shiroshika Kulatilake, solutions architect at WSO2, explained the idea behind having a ROA in your organization, both externally and internally and also talked about how WSO2 technology can help you built your enterprise system in a resource oriented manner. 

Building Web Apps Using Web-Oriented Architecture

Web-oriented architecture (WOA) or SOA + WWW + REST  takes you several steps further by filling the blanks of SOA and helping you build an end-to-end complete web application. In addition to APIs, WOA identifies user interfaces and application states as first-class components of an architecture. Most of what we build today is actually WOA, though the abbreviation might not be that popular.

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Lead Solutions Engineer at WSO2, Dakshitha Ratnayake, discussed the changes to WOA over the years, today’s trends, and how you can leverage WOA to build web apps. 

Reinforcing Your Enterprise With Security Architectures

WSO2’s VP - Engineering, Selvaratnam Uthaiyashankar presented an informative session on

leveraging the extensive feature set and extensible nature of the WSO2 platform to provide a robust security architecture for your enterprise. He also explained some of WSO2’s experiences with customers in building a security architecture and thereby extracting commonly used security architecture patterns.

Understanding Microservice Architecture

Today many organizations are leveraging microservice architecture (MSA), which is becoming increasingly popular because of its many potential advantages. MSA itself is divided into two areas - inner and outer architectures -  which require separate attention. Moreover, MSA requires a certain level of developer and devops experience too. Sagara Gunathunge, architect at WSO2, presented an awareness session about MSA and also discussed WSO2's strategic initiatives in both the platform level and WSO2 MSF4J framework level. 

Deployment Patterns and Capacity Planning

Identifying the right deployment architecture is key when providing smooth operation of a production system. In the next step, it’s crucial to determine the size of the deployment by understanding the number of servers/VMs/containers necessary to support the minimum, average and possible maximum load that the system is expected to handle. Solutions Engineer at WSO, Chathura Kulasinghe, in this talk focused on how you could take a fact based approach to determine the size of your deployment. 

Pattern-Driven Enterprise Architecture: Applying Patterns in Your Architecture

It’s no secret that architectural patterns help you build beautiful enterprise architecture. High-level patterns such as SOA, ROA, EDA, MSA and WOA provide many best practices for enterprise architects who are looking to evolve their existing enterprise architecture or for those creating newer enterprise architecture strategies. Mifan Careem, director - solutions architecture at WSO2, analyzed the good, the bad and the ugly (if any) of the various architectural patterns in his talk. He discussed practical examples of the patterns in practice and also went on to build a solution architecture from scratch using WSO2 components with the help of patterns. 

Still interested in meeting the experts and discussing these topics and more? Sign up now for WSO2Con EU, which will be held in London from June 7 to 9. Be sure to grab the early bird offer before May 8.

 
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