Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
From Previous PartsPart 1 discussed the four ages of mankind. The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by ve…
Recently, I visited a few conferences and I noticed a somewhat hidden theme. While a lot of attention was being paid to moving to a (hybrid) cloud-based architecture and what you need for that (such as cloud management platforms), a… Read More T…
Each of these publications can be accessed with free registration on the MIT CISR website. Designing Digital Organizations—Summary of Survey Findings To succeed in the digital economy, established businesses must develop and apply new technology and organizational capabilities. In August 2016, MIT CISR distributed a survey to 171 senior business and IT leaders about their […]
Here’s another pair of glasses with which to look at organisations. It can be used either together with the Essential Balances or with the Productive Paradoxes, or on its own. For those new to my “glasses” metaphor, here’s a quick intro. The Glasses Metaphor As I’m sceptical about the usefulness of methodologies, frameworks and best […]
I’m hugely grateful to Oliver Baier for the following Twitter-thread, which he posted on Christmas Day: A few things clicked for me in the last few days: Once again I’ve been struggling with my professional practice. Do I even have one?…
Following complaints that Amazon sometimes uses excessively large boxes for packing small items, the following claim appeared on Reddit.”Amazon uses a complicated software system to determine the box size that should be used based on what else is going…
Marketers have a new measurement mandate: to measure effectiveness across all channels and tactics by using advanced marketing measurement techniques. Yet, marketers remain in the dark; they are confused, and overwhelmed about the numerous measurement …
Our recently released Forrester Wave: Enterprise Mobility Management, Q4 2017 uses 26 criteria to evaluate the top 13 mobility management solutions on the market today. Unlike in year’s past, this year’s analysis reveals that a unified approach to devi…
When you get over the fear of a robot taking over your job – because if you see our robots today they are still pretty dumb – your next big concern is how these new workers are going to perform. It’s not just a training question, it&#…
When you get over the fear of a robot taking over your job – because if you see our robots today they are still pretty dumb – your next big concern is how these new workers are going to perform. It’s not just a training question, it&#…
In 2017 — although I suppose I should say in 2018, as it’s almost the end of December — it is simply unacceptable for any IT organization to focus on an Agile-only or DevOps-only journey. They are two sides of the same coin, and one completes the other…
Oracle Fn – Serverless Computing for the Enterprise
In other blog posts, I have talked about emerging technologies and, when I say emerging, I mean that they are are beginning to “cross the chasm” and become more widely used.
Serverless computing is gaining popularity because it allows developers to focus on the functionality of their code and not be worried about the target deployment environment. You could say it takes a lot of the “Ops” out of DevOps 😉 Developer’s code can scale as needed automatically. Another advantage is that Serverless is elastic in its compute utilization which means you use compute resources only as they are needed in an on-demand fashion.
As Shaun Smith said in his blog introducing the project, Fn is a container native Apache 2.0 licensed Serverless platform that you can run anywhere–any cloud or on-premise. It’s easy to use, supports every programming language, and is extensible and performant. In that blog you learn that Fn is based on technology and a team that has been doing Serverless at scale both pre and post Docker. In fact, Docker is the only dependency. This is key because it means that developers can run Fn projects anywhere; different cloud providers, and even on their laptops for development.
For more background on why Serverless is important, see this article “What is Serverless Computing and Why is it Important” by Dylan Stamat from the team that helped create the Fn project.
For a enterprise-level technology to take off and become widely accepted, it needs to be open – that is a lesson we have learned since the earliest days of Java all the way through the numerous open source projects that have shaped the landscape. So, Oracle understands the power and usefulness of Serverless computing but, unlike some other vendors, does not believe that it should be proprietary. To the contrary, it should be open source.
To get an even more detailed look at why Oracle created the Fn Apache project, read “8 Reasons why we built the Fn Project” Chad Arimura – worth a read!
So, Serverless impacts Enterprise Architecture because it is a new model that needs to be worked into many companies ecosystem topographic maps and changes how enterprises need to support custom code in a very positive way.
You can access the Fn open-source project/materials at GitHub 