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Monday, May 7
 

8:30am CDT

Course 1: Essential Microservice Architecture
Many organizations are adopting microservices, but often their developers are not aware of the tradeoffs involved and the many design strategies available. In this course, we will cover the essential knowledge for successful microservice designs.

In this one-day course we will cover four basic guidelines for service-oriented designs that use microservices. We'll look at the main strategies available today to realize each design guideline. These strategies include Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), the Database per Microservice pattern, the Service Data Replication pattern ("cache"), CQRS, API gateway, design standards for REST APIs, asynchronous messaging patterns, and the use of Domain-Driven Design to remodel services to avoid distributed transactions.

For this class, we developed a simple, clear, and consistent design notation for the more than 45 design diagrams used to convey and exemplify the design guidelines and strategies. But you don't just get to listen and read. Participants will share their experience throughout the course. The class ends with a hands-on design lab, in which attendees evaluate an existing design based on the design guidelines, and create a new design using different patterns and other design strategies.

Prerequisites: Participants should have a sound understanding of distributed systems and REST.
Speakers
avatar for Paulo Merson

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)
Paulo Merson has been programming in the small and programming in the large for over 30 years. Paulo is a software developer at the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts. He is a Visiting Scientist with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a certified instructor for Arcitura, and... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 8:30am - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Course

8:30am CDT

Course 2: Launching and Sustaining Agile Architecture
The importance of embracing both agile software development techniques and a solid software architecture focus is not questioned by software engineers and organizations. However, balancing the two still is a mysterious art rather than common practice.
The phrase “agile architecture” evokes two concepts: 1. A system or software architecture that is versatile, easy to evolve, and easy to modify, while resilient enough not to degrade after a few changes. 2. An agile way to define an architecture, using an iterative lifecycle, allowing the architectural design to tactically evolve over time, as the problem and the constraints are better understood. In the best of worlds, we’d like to have an agile process that leads to a flexible architecture.
Agile Architecting is a course designed to help developers, architects, and managers learn how to introduce software architecture into agile software development. We will cover concepts such as
  • quality attributes and agile requirements
  • aligning architecture and organization
  • delivery infrastructures for agile development
  • developing your runway.
 
We will play a design game about big data systems to simulate architecting in an agile and iterative incremental manner. We will end by discussing small targeted changes that software teams can make today to ensure architectural tasks successfully enable agile development.
Speakers
avatar for Ipek Ozkaya

Ipek Ozkaya

Software Engineering Institute
Ipek Ozkaya is a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). With her team at the SEI, she works to help organizations improve their software development efficiency and system evolution. Her work focuses on software architecture... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 8:30am - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Course

8:30am CDT

Course 3: Cloud Computing: An Architecture-centric View
Cloud computing is changing the way we design, deploy, and manage software systems. In addition to supporting today's business goals, the cloud's elastic capacity and pay-per-use cost model let us rapidly deliver new types of solutions that weren't practical just a few years ago.
 
This one-day course provides an architecture-centric introduction to cloud concepts and capabilities, targeting architects, managers, and technical leaders who want to quickly get up to speed on cloud computing and how it impacts their designs and development processes. This is a fast-evolving field, so we'll focus on enduring principles and how the fundamental characteristics of cloud computing impact system architectures. The material emphasizes Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), as a way to understand how the cloud works, and includes discussion of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) models.
 
We'll begin with definitions and examples, and discuss the role of enabling technologies like virtualization and containerization. We'll look at tradeoffs involved in using cloud native services for storage, database, networking, and application integration. This all leads up to a discussion of quality attributes in the cloud, and how this impacts our architecture approaches.
 
Course attendees will get a better understanding of the issues when migrating legacy systems to the cloud, be able to identify opportunities to develop new cloud-based solutions to meet business goals, and understand the changes to architecture approaches and development processes needed to create successful cloud-based software systems.
Speakers
avatar for John Klein

John Klein

Software Engineering Institute
John Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, doing consulting and research in software architecture practices. He came to the SEI from industry, where he was a chief software architect at Avaya. Klein has experience leading architecture... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 8:30am - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Course

8:30am CDT

Growing Great Software Designers Workshop (by invitation only)
Since 2015, Michael and George have facilitated a workshop on the Monday before the SATURN Conference to bring together a group of interested and enthusiastic participants to focus on a topic that is emerging as important for software architects. The topic for 2018 is Growing Great Software Designers and provides an opportunity to share what we have learned and are applying in our day jobs. Invited participants will hear and share stories of valiant attempts, grand strategies, energizing wins, and humbling defeats in this area. At the end of the workshop, the group will work to generalize and distill their discussions so that others can benefit from them. A debrief of the workshop will be presented on Thursday at 3:45 p.m.
Speakers
avatar for George Fairbanks

George Fairbanks

Google
George Fairbanks is a software engineer with academic leanings. His formative years were in the object-oriented world of Smalltalk, UML, and design patterns. He received a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he learned software architecture from David... Read More →
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

IBM Watson
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at IBM, where he helps build Watson and has worked in the software industry for more than a decade. He is author of the book Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. Keeling has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 8:30am - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Workshop

5:30pm CDT

Welcome Reception and New Attendee Orientation
Join the SATURN Technical Committee, speakers, and staff for a networking reception that includes light snacks and the chance to ask questions about the upcoming conference. If this is your first SATURN conference, we can help you navigate the program and find the sessions that you’re really interested in attending. Plus, you can meet other attendees and make new contacts.
Monday May 7, 2018 5:30pm - 6:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Reception

6:30pm CDT

Software Architecture Boot Camp: Architecture 101
The right architecture can make or break a project, or an entire company. Participants will learn what architects do, why it is important, and some tips on how to talk about architecture with stakeholders. We'll start with some definitions and case study examples of how architecture supports business goals. Then we'll dig into how an architecture's separation of concerns helps us deal with complexity. We'll also look at some rules of thumb for creating good architectures, consider how to incorporate architecture into agile projects, and finish up with a map of architecture-centric processes.
Speakers
avatar for John Klein

John Klein

Software Engineering Institute
John Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, doing consulting and research in software architecture practices. He came to the SEI from industry, where he was a chief software architect at Avaya. Klein has experience leading architecture... Read More →
avatar for Ipek Ozkaya

Ipek Ozkaya

Software Engineering Institute
Ipek Ozkaya is a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). With her team at the SEI, she works to help organizations improve their software development efficiency and system evolution. Her work focuses on software architecture... Read More →

Monday May 7, 2018 6:30pm - 8:00pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk
 
Tuesday, May 8
 

8:30am CDT

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Speakers
avatar for John Klein

John Klein

Software Engineering Institute
John Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, doing consulting and research in software architecture practices. He came to the SEI from industry, where he was a chief software architect at Avaya. Klein has experience leading architecture... Read More →
avatar for Paulo Merson

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)
Paulo Merson has been programming in the small and programming in the large for over 30 years. Paulo is a software developer at the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts. He is a Visiting Scientist with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a certified instructor for Arcitura, and... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 8:30am - 9:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

9:00am CDT

Keynote: The Whys and Hows of Evolutionary Architecture
The perceptions of Evolutionary Architecture have progressed rapidly from something considered heretical to something considered essential yet challenging. The shift has resulted from changes in both the business climate with its need for rapid innovation and the supporting technology that makes Evolutionary Architecture feasible. Describing these changes sets up a discussion about the mechanics of implementing an evolutionary architecture. We'll particularly focus on the central role of fitness functions in driving the architecture in the desired direction and how techniques such as refactoring databases and continuous delivery support architectural evolution. We'll close by looking at what the future holds.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Keynotes
avatar for Rebecca Parsons

Rebecca Parsons

Chief Technology Officer, ThoughtWorks
Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 30 years' application development experience, in a wide range of domains. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications, services based applications... Read More →
Tuesday May 8, 2018 9:00am - 10:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Keynote

10:30am CDT

A Lesson Learned from DevOps Transformation at Air-Gapped Environments
DevOps has become a standard option for entities seeking to streamline and increase comprehensive participation by all stakeholders in their secure development lifecycle (SDLC). In most cases in industry, academia, and government, applying DevOps is a straightforward process. There is a subset of entities in these three sectors where applying Secure DevOps is challenging. These are entities that are highly regulated (HRE) as mandated by policies for various reasons (most often for general security reasons and the protection of intellectual property). This presentation describes what was learned applying DevOps in these environments.

The SDLC of a highly regulated entity can still benefit from implementing DevOps as long as it does not break any policy. An HRE is typically characterized by the following: air-gapped computer systems, isolated working groups, strong physical security, segregation of duties, an inability to speak openly on certain topics, strong scrutinizing to enter certain areas, inability to take certain artifacts off the premises, and required risk management framework integration into application development process. In general, these environments promote isolation and gaps between persons and projects—in direct contrast to DevOps, where the main goal is to establish open communication between all members and stakeholders of a project, including SOC staff.
Speakers
avatar for David Shepard

David Shepard

Software Engineering Institute
David has made a career working in many different areas of the information technology field. He has spent time building networks, administering servers, designing software, writing and debugging software, working on process improvement initiatives, auditing application security, implementing... Read More →
avatar for Hasan Yasar

Hasan Yasar

Software Engineering Institute
Hasan Yasar is the technical manager of the Secure Lifecycle Solutions group in the CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Hasan leads an engineering group on software development processes and methodologies (specifically on DevOps and development... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

10:30am CDT

Blockchain Is the Answer. What Was the Question Again?
Blockchain is being hyped as never before. Since last year’s SATURN, a series of blockchain initiatives has been run, both internally and in consortia with other companies. We have learned quite a few things about what makes a good blockchain problem through these efforts. This experience report will describe the internal checklist that we use to prioritize projects and fend off over-hyped blockchain enthusiasts.

Key topics include defining transactions to put on the chain, transparency requirements, Central Authorities, open vs. permissioned blockchains, transaction speed, consensus mechanisms (and how to reach a single version of the truth), and some examples of business problems where blockchain can be part of the solution.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Harald Wesenberg

Harald Wesenberg

Statoil ASA
Harald Wesenberg 20 years’ experience in software engineering, with many of those years writing software for Statoil, a large, multinational oil company. In addition to software development, Wesenberg has been a project manager, line manager, software architect, data architect... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

10:30am CDT

A Token Walks into a SPA...
Seems like all that’s heard about these days are Single Page Applications. Angular, React, Vue, Ember—they are transforming the way we think about the frontend. But what about securing these applications? This often tends to take a back seat to speed, animations, and other cool features of these frameworks. Between cookies, tokens, keeping users authenticated, and handling resource access, securing these apps can be tricky. It may even feel like a second page is needed (gasp!) for the authentication setup! But there is technology to create truly secure single-page applications. This tutorial walks through securing a Vue application, but the approach will apply to nearly any single-page application framework.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Ado Kukic

Ado Kukic

Auth0
Ado Kukic is a full-stack developer, advocate, and technical writer at Auth0. Mixing his passions for programming and education, he creates tutorials, courses, and other educational content focusing on security, authentication, and much more. On the front-end, he prefers Angular... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 10:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

10:30am CDT

Marvin AI: An Open Source Platform to Deploy and Manage Machine Learning Models
The recently open-sourced platform called Marvin AI is helping B2W Digital data science teams to put some interesting projects into production, such as the dynamic pricing and fraud detection. The platform is helping B2W avoid challenges that are common in machine learning projects, like building a hypothesis prototype and putting it in production, enabling it to handle ever-increasing data sets, and supporting the necessary throughput of the largest e-commerce company in South America.

Marvin AI is made up of tools, libraries, an embedded server that exposes microservices to serve and manage models, and a very useful design pattern, DASFE, that simplifies the process of building new machine learning engines. In this 90-minute hands-on tutorial, one of the project architects and main open source contributor will explain all the core features of Marvin.

See the slides.
Speakers
avatar for Daniel Takabayashi

Daniel Takabayashi

B2W Digital
Daniel Takabayashi is passionate about disruptive technology and the idea that computing is an art that must be developed with creativity. His agile leadership of high-level technical teams focuses on productive results and satisfaction of staff. Takabayashi has a full technical... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 10:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

11:15am CDT

Architectural Tradeoffs in Learning-Based Software
In classical software development, developers write explicit instructions in a programming language to hardcode the explicit behavior of software systems. By writing each line of code, the programmer instructs the software to have the desirable behavior by exploring a specific point in program space.

Recently, however, software systems are adding learning components that, instead hardcoding an explicit behavior, learn a behavior through data. The learning-intensive software systems are written in terms of models and their parameters that need to be adjusted based on data. In learning-enabled systems, we specify some constraints on the behavior of a desirable program (e.g., a data set of input–output pairs of examples) and use the computational resources to search through the program space to find a program that satisfies the constraints. In neural networks, we restrict the search to a continuous subset of the program space.

This talk provides experimental evidence of making tradeoffs for deep neural network models, using the Deep Neural Network Architecture system as a case study. Concrete experimental results are presented; also featured are additional case studies in big data (Storm, Cassandra), data analytics (configurable boosting algorithms), and robotics applications.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Pooyan Jamshidi

Pooyan Jamshidi

Carnegie Mellon University
Pooyan Jamshidi is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and from August 2018, he will become an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Pooyan's general research interests are at the intersection of software engineering, systems, and machine learning... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

11:15am CDT

Rest.li: RESTful Service Architecture at Scale with Asynchronous/Non-blocking IO
Eager to transform a legacy application to modern microservice architecture, but having trouble finding an appropriate REST framework that covers your client, server, documentation, and discovery needs? Rest.li (http://rest.li/) may be the answer. It has successfully transformed LinkedIn from a monolithic application to a microservice-based architecture with a scale of thousands of rapidly evolving services.

Rest.li is an open source REST client/server framework for building robust, scalable RESTful architectures using asynchronous/non-blocking IO. Compared to other popular RESTful frameworks, Rest.li fills a niche by standardizing an end-to-end developer workflow to promote clean REST best practices.

As an open source project, we are striving to promote multi-language client support and pluggable architecture. Rest.li already supports Java, Android, iOS, Python and C#, and its custom codec and filter chain provide great room for customization. The rest.li framework has been proven to create robust RESTful service architectures that can work at scale from its wide adoption at LinkedIn and Coursera.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Min Chen

Min Chen

LinkedIn
Min Chen is a staff software engineer at LinkedIn. She works on application and service infrastructure division at LinkedIn, which provides infrastructural support for LinkedIn microservice architectures and super-blocks. In particular, she is actively involved in open-source Rest.li... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

Bringing the Fun Back in Vendor Selection
Vendor selection can be a tedious process, especially for a multi-million-dollar development project. Issuing and receiving RFIs and the RFPs takes months of calendar time, and when the replies are measured in pounds rather than pages it quickly becomes no fun at all. But there is another way to do this… In this session I will tell the story of a joint effort by nine companies in the commodity trading business and how we selected a (set of) technology partners for our new FinTech startup in less than 6 weeks from beginning to end through an Open Development Challenge (ODC). The ODC forced us to focus our effort by defining an architectural representation of the problem, and then lead the ODC contestants through three phases (problem description, coding and innovation deep dive) to find the best partner(s). Because as we all know, the truth can only be found one place: in the code.
Speakers
avatar for Harald Wesenberg

Harald Wesenberg

Statoil ASA
Harald Wesenberg 20 years’ experience in software engineering, with many of those years writing software for Statoil, a large, multinational oil company. In addition to software development, Wesenberg has been a project manager, line manager, software architect, data architect... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park

1:00pm CDT

Building Large-Scale Web Apps and Platforms
PayPal Checkout recently adopted a platform-centric approach and started re-architecting its web platform to become more robust, scalable and performant. At the same time, it ensured that development teams can iterate quickly over features. Along the way, we learned some handy architectural patterns that allow for large-scale platform design and maximum code reuse.
This talk will broadly cover state management, caching and performance optimizations, building a flexible and scalable web server atop microservices, and discipline and DevOps practices that allow multiple teams to iterate quickly on the full-stack codebase.
Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:00pm CDT

How Do Software Architects Find the Way to User Experience? With Google Maps!
A successful software system requires both, a strong software architecture and a great user experience (UX). Although it is a quality attribute, UX is surprisingly often neglected by software architects. The characters of people working as UX designers and software architects are often very different, as well as their educational background. Thus, they often don’t understand each other very well and also avoid overly busy communication. This further results in lack of respect for the others’ profession and contribution to the overall success of a software system.

In this talk, using Google Maps as an example, we show many architectural decisions necessary to achieve an excellent UX, as it is expected from Google: Google-like simplicity, a large number of powerful features, and Google-like integration of all kind of helpful services. We aim to increase the mutual understanding between architects and user experience designers. By providing concrete guidelines and best practices, we encourage concrete and intensified collaboration in order to build excellent software systems.

See the slides.
Speakers
avatar for Matthias Naab

Matthias Naab

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Matthias Naab is a software architect at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and heads the department for architecture-centric engineering. He is responsible for the development of architecture methods and consulting projects... Read More →
avatar for Marcus Trapp

Marcus Trapp

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Marcus Trapp is software engineer of passion. He is heading the User Experience and Requirements Engineering (UXR) department at Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE). In keeping with his motto “software is no end in itself; it always supports or enables... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

Software Architecture Boot Camp: Architecture Documentation: Structures, Behavior, and Design Decisions
Have you ever...
  • been confused by an arrow in a box-and-line design diagram?
  • read code for hours and yearned for a clear "big picture" explanation?
  • found a debatable design decision and wished someone could explain the rationale behind it?
 
If your answer is yes to any of these questions, this talk has practical and valuable information for you. The goal is to discuss what information about a software architecture should be captured, so that others can successfully use it, maintain it, and build a system from it. Important takeaways from this talk include: how to document the architecture in multiple views; how to complement structural diagrams with sequence diagrams, statecharts and other behavior diagrams; how to record design decision in a simple and effective way.
Speakers
avatar for James Ivers
avatar for Paulo Merson

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)
Paulo Merson has been programming in the small and programming in the large for over 30 years. Paulo is a software developer at the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts. He is a Visiting Scientist with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a certified instructor for Arcitura, and... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

Smart Decisions Game: Machine Learning for Architects
Machine learning (ML) has gained tremendous traction in research and industry over the past few years. Its remarkable progress, supported by achievements in Big Data architectures, has enabled the creation of practical cutting-edge AI applications. Once available only to scientists, today ML is achievable by a much broader audience of software architects and engineers. In fact, the practice of ML is so advanced that some algorithm results look like “black magic,” even for experienced practitioners.

But how do we design such systems? Best practices in software architecture guide us with robust methods to analyze requirements and create architecture designs that predictably satisfy business and system needs. Inspired by attribute-driven design (ADD) and Smart Decisions (a software architecture design game for Big Data), the presenters are happy to introduce a new version of the game focused on designing ML systems.

In this participatory session, you will have fun and learn about designing the architecture for ML systems via a series of gamified interactive exercises. We will simulate the state of the art of designing ML systems through analyzing business and technical requirements, selecting the best matching algorithms, and validating early design decisions using rapid prototyping techniques.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Serge Haziyev

Serge Haziyev

SoftServe
Serge Haziyev works as a VP of Intelligent Enterprise at SoftServe, a leading digital services and software development company. Serge has more than 20 years of experience in various technology domains including Big Data, AI, IoT, Clouds and Carrier-grade telecommunication services. He... Read More →
avatar for Rick Kazman

Rick Kazman

Software Engineering Institute/University of Hawaii
Rick Kazman is a professor at the University of Hawaii and a research scientist at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Kazman has created several influential methods and tools for architecture analysis, including the Software Architecture Analysis Method... Read More →
avatar for Iurii Milovanov

Iurii Milovanov

SoftServe
Iurii Milovanov is a Data Science Practice Leader for SoftServe with more than 8 years of industry experience in building enterprise-level AI and Big Data solutions. He is a computer science expert with strong emphasis on cutting-edge technologies. His research interests include various... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

1:45pm CDT

How to "Talk" to Your Software: Alexa, Google, Watson, and Cortana, a Side-by-Side Comparison of Cloud Speech Recognition APIs
The APIs behind the voices of Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Echo are now available for all to us to explore on the cloud. How to choose which one to use (and when) can be mind boggling in the context of different pricing models, API rating schemes, model accuracy, security, and privacy concerns.

This talk is based on experience working on a startup venture that was betting on natural language processing as a key enabling technology. It is a fascinating journey of exploring the API options available and comparing what you can get with each of them. Although there is some overlap, the research also demonstrates significant differences in approach, accuracy, and use case application. Node-red, an open source flow design tool, is used to illustrate the patterns and tradeoffs of the APIs within the context of a simple use case.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Arila Barnes

Arila Barnes

GE Renewables Digital
Arila Barnes is a principal architect at GE Renewables Digital in San Ramon, California, with more than 15 years’ experience in software development and architecture, and more than  10 years’ experience applying Agile practices. She joined GE Software in 2013 and has been involved... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:45pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:45pm CDT

Scaling Services with an In-Memory Distributed Cache
This talk describes the problems we faced in scaling a high-throughput API at GO-JEK and how using the constructs of Golang to build a distributed in-memory cache eventually solved the problem. Using code as an example, we will discuss the choice of data structure, its time complexity based on the Golang spec, and concerns around thread safety that we encountered.

We will present a few examples of “war stories” that the team faced while implementing it and how we solved them. By learning about the importance of and implementation approach toward the eviction policy, the audience will both be able to understand the significance of cache invalidation and implement one by themselves using the Golang concurrency constructs.

With the ever-increasing demand to handle data, we will also discuss how we implemented sharding to minimize the memory footprint, hence enabling scaling up approximately 10-fold in a short time. By implementing the practices described in this talk, the audience will be able to make an informed decision of choosing whether a distributed in-memory caching approach makes sense for their problem and, if yes, implement one by themselves.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Chirag Aggarwal

Chirag Aggarwal

Go-Jek Engineering
Chirag Aggarwal works at Go-Jek Engineering. Go-Jek has been working on a large-scale mobile-first transportation startup with an app having 20 million Play Store and App Store downloads, which has seen 900-fold growth in the past year.
avatar for Divya Nagar

Divya Nagar

Go-Jek Engineering
Divya Nagar is a product engineer at Go-Jek. She works with the team who builds and scales the Pricing and Allocation arms of the company. Her team uses Golang as one of their core languages. She is an open source enthusiast and is currently learning about distributed systems.

Tuesday May 8, 2018 1:45pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

3:00pm CDT

No Coding Required: Building a Kubernetes Native IPaaS
The ease of deployment of cloud-based systems and the availability of open source integration components allows the creation of frameworks where the business analyst has become the programmer. This seems to be the evolution of programming. How did we get here?

This presentation describes the experiences obtained while working on an IPaaS (integration platform as a service) called Syndesis. Syndesis is a cloud-native application with a microservice architecture leveraging Docker, Kubernetes, and Camel. It can be installed to public as well as private clouds.

I will focus on the development processes of Syndesis itself (which was heavily UX first) as well as the costs and benefits of developing on Kubernetes. I will cover the design choices made to facilitate a globally distributed team to be able to work independently. By leveraging Camel Components for integration routes, we created a working platform fast, but we had to solve a number of CI-related problems. I will also highlight the benefits of a jsonDB for UI development.

The end product creates an integration that is a container deployed to the Kubernetes infrastructure. The presentation concludes with a short demo of creating and deploying an integration.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Kurt T. Stam

Kurt T. Stam

Red Hat
Kurt Stam has been working in the enterprise integration space for two decades. He has designed and implemented integration solutions for high-volume distributed systems in the telecommunication, financial, and travel industries. He is a principal middleware developer at Red Hat... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 3:00pm - 3:45pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

3:00pm CDT

Continuous Delivery with Containers: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Implementing a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline is not trivial, and the introduction of container technology to the development stack can introduce additional challenges and requirements. In this talk, we will look at the high-level steps that are essential for creating an effective pipeline for developing and deploying containerized applications. Topics covered include the impact of containers on CD, adding metadata to a container image, validating NFR changes imposed by executing Java applications within a container, and lessons learned the hard way (in production).

A supporting O'Reilly report, "Containerizing Continuous Delivery in Java," is also be available online, although it is worth noting that the talk is concept-driven and relatively language neutral. The report builds on ideas from the presentation and contains instructions and code for how to create a Jenkins-based CD pipeline that takes a series of Java applications and containerizes them, ready for functional and nonfunctional testing and, ultimately, deployment.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Daniel Bryant

Daniel Bryant

Head of DevRel, Ambassador Labs
Daniel Bryant works as a Product Architect at Datawire, and is the News Manager at InfoQ, and Chair for QCon London. His current technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms and microservice implementations. Daniel is a leader within the London Java... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Invited Speaker

3:00pm CDT

Software Architecture Boot Camp-Lightweight Architecture Evaluations: The Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method and Beyond
Architecture is critical for business success. A solid architecture helps prevent defects and system failures. It helps a development effort save money and get quality products to the market faster. Most software-reliant systems are required to be modifiable and reliable. They may also need to be secure, interoperable, and portable. Data demonstrates that the most costly technical debt that organizations are struggling with results from making poor architectural choices and inadequately managing architectural decisions. How do you know whether your software architecture is suitable or at risk relative to its target system qualities? How do you assess whether it has technical debt? This Architecture Boot Camp session covers practical and proven architecture analysis and evaluation principles that should be incorporated into any software architecture evaluation process.  We will demonstrate these principles that identify risks early in the development lifecycle, using scenario-driven peer reviews in the context of the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), a tested process that has been used in many evaluations over the past 15 years. 
Speakers
avatar for John Klein

John Klein

Software Engineering Institute
John Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, doing consulting and research in software architecture practices. He came to the SEI from industry, where he was a chief software architect at Avaya. Klein has experience leading architecture... Read More →
avatar for Ipek Ozkaya

Ipek Ozkaya

Software Engineering Institute
Ipek Ozkaya is a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). With her team at the SEI, she works to help organizations improve their software development efficiency and system evolution. Her work focuses on software architecture... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

3:00pm CDT

An Awaiting Sev0: Operational and Incident Considerations for Architects
More and more of the software we work on is offered as a service to customers. Gone are the days of walking into a big-box office supply store and buying bits in cardboard, pressed on plastic. While presenting unique design challenges, this shift also requires that in addition to developing software, our teams must also operate it. 
This talk looks at the emergent application of the fields of human factors and safety science to that of software development and operations. Topics include team incident response, incident lifecycle management, incident retrospectives and postmortems, chaos engineering, the connection to organizational learning, and the impact of all of these on application architecture, design, and development. With so much of the value of the software we develop ultimately being expressed in (and potentially limited by) how well we are able to operate it, the importance and impact of these issues and practices will only continue to increase. 
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Speakers
avatar for J. Paul Reed

J. Paul Reed

Release Engineering Approaches
J. Paul Reed has more than 15 years’ experience as a build/release engineer, working with such storied companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce. In 2012, he founded Release Engineering Approaches, a consultancy incorporating a host of tools and techniques... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

3:45pm CDT

Finally Compare Today’s Performance to Yesterday’s
Up until now, assessing whether application performance is “good” or “bad” has been just for the performance experts, mostly because they were the most familiar with an application’s performance history. All that could change if everyone on the team (Dev and Ops) could easily compare (on a single graph) response times between all recent load tests: nightly builds, big releases, whatever.
With a tool set that finally delivered a richer performance history, the entire team could plainly see that Response Time from last night’s load test …
… either matched that of all previous releases … and it’s all GOOD
… or was radically slower than all previous releases, and performance is BAD.
There would be no lingering questions about when did performance get so bad, because the entire team would always be able to compare response time to every single load test in CI/CD, even those from past releases.
This talk introduces the “applesToApples” solution, which provides metrics from the load generator including response time, throughput, error counts, number of concurrent threads of load, and more: https://github.com/eostermueller/applesToApples
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Speakers
avatar for Erik Ostermueller

Erik Ostermueller

Fidelity Information Services
Erik Ostermueller has spent the last 10 years tuning high-throughput Java financial systems in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. In 2011, he wrote a paper for an international performance conference titled “How to Help Developers (Finally) Find Their Own Performance Defects... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 3:45pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

4:45pm CDT

Azure Table Storage: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Azure Table storage, a NoSQL data service in the cloud. Schemaless and with JSON compatibility, it’s simple and it does its job well. But everything great has its pitfalls.

Join in this lightning talk to look at and investigate the wonders and the mysteries, the shocks and the no-nos of using Azure Table storage. We will look at sample code, setting up and using the storage in action. Most notably, the program also looks at performance metrics, comparing Azure Table storage to other data services. Is this the thing for you? Find out!

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Speakers
avatar for Sirar Salih

Sirar Salih

Making Waves
Sirar Salih is a technical lead and solution architect working at Making Waves. He is the creator of the node-server-ar-drone library at NPM, co-founder of the AngularJS Oslo user group, board member of the Norwegian .NET User Group Oslo, former vice president of the Norwegian .NET... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 4:45pm - 5:00pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session, DEV@SATURN

5:00pm CDT

Enterprise IT: Architecture to the Rescue
Architecture contains the potential to guide the development of big enterprise in the right direction, connecting the existing IT portfolio to the business functions and using this as a map to guide future development. This talk will show you how we have set up a company-wide network of architects both on the business side and on the IT side that work together. They span the different business functions in order to handle both the internal architecture for each business function and, more importantly, the interface between the business functions. A key part of this is taking advantage of new ways of working, such as design thinking and DevOps—as well as new technology, such as microservices, machine learning, Hadoop data lakes, and web-based and mobile clients.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Jørn Ølmheim

Jørn Ølmheim

Leading Advisor, Statoil ASA
Jørn Ølmheim is a practicing software professional with strong interest in open source, internet technology, and programming languages. He currently is data and solution architect at Statoil, focusing on software architecture and systems integration challenges. Statoil ASA is the... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 5:00pm - 5:15pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session, DEV@SATURN

5:15pm CDT

Tiered Blockchain Mechanisms for High-Integrity Outcomes
As Don Tapscott once said, “The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation—powered by blockchain technology—is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.”

Traditional consensus algorithms like proof-of-work are inefficient at scale, and smart contracts are limited to a single ecosystem. However, by creating a “blockchain of blockchains” architecture, more complex event-driven architectures can be created using separate ecosystems that are independently validated. For example, a smart city could be programmed to execute an emergency shutdown if certain criteria are met. A designer of this system would want to make absolutely sure that the conditions were true before executing a threat response of this magnitude. By having each IoT sensor group that measures a specific environmental condition on its own “sidechain” network, and sharing their ‘state’ to a main authoritative blockchain network, one can create data integrity checks that prevent these programs from triggering by accident in a fault tolerant and distributed manner.

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Speakers
avatar for Ryan Luckay

Ryan Luckay

Ryan Luckay works as a project manager and futurist for government clients. He has co-authored more than 15 patents on behalf of his clients and has years of emerging technology incubator project delivery experience, including a project costing $80 million. Luckay loves movies, video... Read More →

Tuesday May 8, 2018 5:15pm - 5:30pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session, DEV@SATURN

6:00pm CDT

SATURN Celebration Reception
Join us at the Hilton's Fire Pit for a Texas-sized SATURN Reception! Get some grub and have some fun after the first full conference day. Plus catch up with colleagues you know and meet new ones.
Tuesday May 8, 2018 6:00pm - 8:00pm CDT
Fire Pit
  Reception
 
Wednesday, May 9
 

8:30am CDT

Morning Remarks
Wednesday May 9, 2018 8:30am - 9:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

9:00am CDT

Keynote: Virtual Reality for Football Concussion Education
A neuroscientist, a radiologist, and an engineer walk into a bar...sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. In reality it marked the beginning of a collaboration to develop a virtual reality app to improve education about concussions among college football players. Concussions are one of the most important public health problems that spans multiple sports including soccer, hockey, wrestling, and other contact sports. This presentation will highlight the development process of the virtual reality app and the lessons learned from the experience working with athletes, soldiers, physicians, and psychologists.
Watch the video.
Keynotes
avatar for Ricardo Valerdi

Ricardo Valerdi

Associate Professor, Systems & Industrial Engineering Director, Sports Management Program, University of Arizona
Dr. Ricardo Valerdi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering and Director of the Sports Management Program at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. Previously he was a Research Associate in the Engineering Systems Division... Read More →
Wednesday May 9, 2018 9:00am - 10:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Keynote

10:30am CDT

Manage Your Technical Debt Portfolio
Technical debt is a natural byproduct of every successful software system. Great teams learn how to use technical debt to their advantage to improve time to market and balance short-term gains with long term pains. In this talk we’ll share our experiences creating, measuring, and paying down technical debt by sharing how we created a technical debt portfolio and used our portfolio as a guide for planning change.

Creating a technical debt portfolio requires that we consider not only the debt within architectural components but also how those components align with the system’s roadmap. We can measure debt in the architecture by looking at metrics such as such quality, churn, and conceptual integrity. We can prioritize the debt across our system by combining technical metrics with business concerns such as the probability of change (based on our roadmap) and potential value created (estimated by our product manager).

By the end of this talk, you will learn strategies for measuring technical debt, creating a portfolio of debt, and using that portfolio to choose next steps to improve your software system.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

IBM Watson
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at IBM, where he helps build Watson and has worked in the software industry for more than a decade. He is author of the book Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. Keeling has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →
avatar for Michael Lipschultz

Michael Lipschultz

IBM Watson
Michael Lipschultz is a software engineer in IBM Watson, focused on AI-enhanced information retrieval solutions for the Watson Discovery Service. He has experience with user modeling and adaptation, natural language processing, and data analysis. Michael has a BS in computer science... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

10:30am CDT

Betting on Evolutionary Architecture: A Note on Software Architecture as Code
We often think of software architecture as one of those things we just have to do right at the beginning of a project, often using fancy tools. In this talk, James offers an alternative. What decisions would we make differently if we had the ability to rapidly evolve our architecture? The tools and techniques we now have available allow a new type of architectural decision making possible; from Software Defined Networking, IaaS and Continuous Delivery to Real Options and Architecture Decision Records. James will cover pre-requisites that allow us to make small bets on architecture and explore the strange world of evolutionary design that this technique makes possible.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for James Lewis

James Lewis

ThoughtWorks
James is a developer at ThoughtWorks. As a member of the ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms and languages. For the last few years he has been... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 10:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Invited Speaker

10:30am CDT

Watson Cognitive Services and Cloud Platform Architecture
Recently, cognitive systems such as IBM Watson have made great strides in impacting many fields. This has unleashed a torrent of innovation in cognitive systems that encompass a broad spectrum of computer science and engineering, from hardware infrastructure to software stack to "as-a-Service" platform layer to data layer and cognitive applications. This talk will overview the anatomy of a true cognitive system that lives and breathes in the cloud. It will cover how Watson has re-architected its platform to leverage Cloud Developer Services, Container Cloud and AI Platform, which is shared among all the Watson Services. We also will cover the AI Platform components and their significance to speed of delivery for Watson.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Aroop Pandya

Aroop Pandya

IBM Watson
Aroop Pandya is a Senior Technical Staff Member and architect in IBM Watson Core team. He is responsible for the end to end architecture of Watson Services Cloud Platform, Platform built on top of Microservices architecture to deliver all Watson to it’s customer as a Service. Aroop... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 10:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Invited Speaker

11:00am CDT

Whom to Marry? Agile Experiments for Tough Architecture Decisions
Growth and new technologies drive small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to increasingly automate their businesses. IT groups at these SMEs must switch from supplying laptops and fixing printers to acting as a trusted partner in new technology decisions. Architects at these SMEs face big questions without the resources of a large enterprise. Kommuninvest is choosing a hybrid integration platform—a life choice, like deciding whom to marry. The decision has a long-term impact and is very expensive to change. Such long-term significant technology decisions require a pragmatic and hands-on approach, with quick results.

Learn how we took an agile yet thorough approach to architecture decisions. We did not invest in a grand plan or thorough evaluation but decided early and evaluated as we built. We assumed that it is cheaper to change the selected technology early than to do a lot of work up front. Yet our approach is thorough, even academic: we evaluate hypotheses using experiments. Collaborating with expert consultants gives us access to competence and knowledge to do so. We deliver results to the business often and have in place the first integrations less than half a year since kick-off with just two part-time resources.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Elisabeth Blom

Elisabeth Blom

Elisabeth works as an integration consultant at Enfo in Sweden. In her current assignments, she helps Kommuninvest establish an integration platform as part of its digital journey, and works as integration specialist in the integration competence center (ICC) at the Örebro Län regional... Read More →
avatar for Thijmen de Gooijer

Thijmen de Gooijer

Kommuninvest
Thijmen de Gooijer works as an IT architect at Kommuninvest in Sweden, where he is the technical lead for its digitalization initiative. Previously, he worked to bring modern architecture practice to IT development and operations in the discrete manufacturing industry within the ASSA... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

11:30am CDT

Evaluation of Legacy Software Architecture
Stability and maturity are quality factors in embedded systems. This is especially true for use in the automotive industry, wherein safety and security are paramount. As the complexity of stakeholder requirements rises, evaluating the software architecture becomes a necessity. The result can support evolutionary or revolutionary changes.

This talk will focus on experiences in evaluating a mature automotive software architecture and its subsequent conclusions. The evaluation criteria focused on entropy and debt.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Michael Turner

Michael Turner

Visteon Corporation
Michael Turner is technical fellow in software architecture at Visteon Corp. He has 25 years’ experience in embedded systems. Turner graduated with distinction from Purdue University with a BSE in computer engineering. He also received the Graduate Excellence Award from the University... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:00pm CDT

A Radio Astronomer and an Architect Walk into a Bar...
The Square Kilometre Array is a massive project: 131,000 antenna elements and receivers to control and monitor (in just one antenna array), and petabytes of data generated and processed daily. In a project this size, architecture documentation is critical to reduce integration risk, especially at subsystem interfaces. The interface syntax must be correct, and the interface semantics must be well designed and understood. What is the error handling approach? How should the interfaces evolve over the system’s 50-year life? What is assumed about the state of a subsystem when a request is issued?

This talk is about a seven-day workshop that taught just enough about software architecture documentation principles to the subsystem designers to enable them to immediately start documenting key architecture views that improved communication and enabled analysis and evaluation. Topics covered include how architecture concepts were introduced to these scientists and system engineers; how the group applied the principles to create documentation artifacts for the SKA system; and what worked well and what might be done differently next time.

This talk is aimed at architects who must bring a team up to speed quickly, overcome initial friction in adopting architecture practices, and demonstrate value quickly.

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Speakers
avatar for John Klein

John Klein

Software Engineering Institute
John Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, doing consulting and research in software architecture practices. He came to the SEI from industry, where he was a chief software architect at Avaya. Klein has experience leading architecture... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:00pm CDT

Cloud-Native Patterns/Anti-Patterns and How to Find Them in Enterprise Systems
Most enterprises understand the value of the cloud but have a significant drag on their ability to define a path forward. While cloud strategies are being defined and target states identified, enterprises typically lack resources, funding, and skill sets to refactor applications for the cloud.

Mining cloud-native patterns/anti-patterns has established a rule set for assessing cloud suitability of .NET and Java enterprise applications. These rules assess the vulnerabilities, performance, availability, dependencies, scalability, portability, and code quality attributes in the application. In this presentation, we will examine a few critical samples of 350-plus rules for Java applications and 250-plus rules for .NET applications identified so far to assess an application’s cloud readiness. These rules form the basis of the cloud assessment tool’s rule set that we are implementing as the SonarQube plugin. The tool helps enterprises accelerate cloud adoption by assessing application code in minutes instead of months. The tool has been used successfully in multiple enterprise assessments and helped migrate existing systems to cloud.

Attendees will learn the cloud-native patterns/anti-patterns for assessing cloud suitability of .NET and Java enterprise applications and the common challenges in enterprise systems migrating to cloud.

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Speakers
avatar for Sean Gilbert

Sean Gilbert

Deloitte Consulting LLP
Sean Gilbert is an Application Architect with Deloitte’s Technology practice working with large commercial and government clients. He leads the firm's Optimization capability and .NET Framework Team building frameworks, tools, and development accelerators to improve the quality... Read More →
avatar for Vishal Prabhu

Vishal Prabhu

Deloitte Consulting LLP
Vishal Prabhu is Deloitte’s cross-industry technology senior manager with specialized skills in application architecture design, cloud system engineering, and application performance testing & tuning. He leads the firm’s Application Assessment and Disaster Recovery as a Cloud... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:00pm CDT

Migrating from Oracle to Espresso
Espresso is LinkedIn's strategic distributed, fault-tolerant NoSQL database that powers many LinkedIn services. Espresso has a large production footprint at LinkedIn, with close to a hundred clusters in use, storing about 420 terabytes of source-of-truth (SoT) data and handling more than two million queries per second at peak load.

This talk discusses our strategy for migrating one of our internal services (Babylonia) from using Oracle to using Espresso. We will present an overview of the Espresso platform and its quality attributes that motivated the migration, as well as the particulars of how we accomplished the migration. Our core requirement was to keep Babylonia running uninterrupted throughout the migration process. These same concerns are common to many database migrations, not only at LinkedIn. The talk covers the steps we took to keep the service running through the transition without affecting our clients.

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Speakers
avatar for David Max

David Max

LinkedIn
David Max is a software engineer at LinkedIn, where he helps build software systems to connect the world’s professionals and create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. He has an MS degree in computer science from New York University and a BS degree in... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:00pm CDT

Shorten Your Architectural Feedback Loop
One of the things architects can learn from the Agile mindset is the importance of short feedback loops. The quicker architects receive feedback on their output, the faster they learn about its effect in their specific solution context—and better informed architects make better decisions. Architecture is a matter of reducing uncertainty by gathering knowledge and making decisions, and a shorter architecture feedback loop speeds up that uncertainty reduction, leading to better architectures. On top of this, shorter loops lead to shorter reaction times when things change, which increases agility.

This talk shares experiences shortening the architectural feedback loop and gives five key tips for practicing architects.

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Speakers
avatar for Eltjo Poort

Eltjo Poort

CGI
Eltjo Poort is distinguished solution architect at CGI in The Netherlands. In his 30-year career in the software industry, he has fulfilled many engineering and project management roles. In the 1990s, he oversaw the implementation of the first SMS text messaging systems in the United... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:30pm CDT

Architectural Hoisting: Or How I Learned to Stop Writing Breaking Code and Love the Architecture
Documentation is an essential analysis and education tool—but documentation alone will not keep your design intent in sync with the emerging software system. Even the most disciplined and dedicated developers will make mistakes, whether by accident or ignorance. The only way to enforce the architecture is to hoist design constraints into the code itself.

Architectural hoisting is a design technique proposed by George Fairbanks in which the responsibilities for enforcing a design decision are implemented in the code instead of relying only on disciplined developers. Architectural hoisting has many benefits beyond enforcement. Hoisting key design decisions helps promote maintainability and readability via architecturally evident code. Hoisted systems are easier to learn and navigate and provide great peace of mind that the quality attributes designed for will actually appear in the built and deployed system.

This talk shares experiences with architectural hoisting in microservices built for IBM Watson. By the end of the talk attendees will know what architectural hoisting is, how it can help you write better software, and see concrete examples in Go and Java.

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Speakers
avatar for Charles Gala

Charles Gala

Charles Gala is a software engineer at IBM Watson, working on machine learning powered information retrieval for Watson Discovery Service. He has a research background in machine learning and pattern recognition techniques using live video. Charles has a master's degree in computer... Read More →
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

IBM Watson
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at IBM, where he helps build Watson and has worked in the software industry for more than a decade. He is author of the book Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. Keeling has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →
avatar for Joe Runde

Joe Runde

IBM Watson
Joe Runde is a software engineer who recently started his career at IBM. There he works on Watson while teaching about machine learning methods and learning about software design from many smarter folks. Runde studied computer science at Oregon State University and machine learning... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:30pm CDT

FamilySearch’s Family Tree Web Application: Replacing Relational Database Technology and Transitioning to Cloud-Hosted Computing
FamilySearch is a large website that provides family history and genealogy features to users throughout the world for free. The Family Tree is one of its web applications that represents a giant, common pedigree that users can view and edit. Since all users can manage its public data, the Family Tree minimizes and eliminates the need for users to duplicate research and entry of common ancestors. It currently contains information about one billion persons, their relationships, and sources, and other memories that document each person’s genealogically meaningful data.

Family Tree’s expansive data—contrasted with the need for a high-performance user experience and its private project funding model—justifies swapping out its proprietary commercial relational database for open-source relational and NoSQL databases. In addition, the accessibility of cloud computing environments makes running Family Tree’s microservice-based architecture appealing. Therefore, FamilySearch undertook and recently completed a project to migrate Family Tree’s databases to open-source and NoSQL databases and transition them to a cloud-hosted computing environment.

This talk presents a detailed technical view of FamilySearch’s approach with its associated challenges and accomplishments of the Family Tree’s database transition and cloud-computing migration project.

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Speakers
avatar for Randy A. Ynchausti

Randy A. Ynchausti

LDS Church
Randy Ynchausti is a software engineer, leader, and architect with extensive experience in family history and genealogy, real-time process optimization and control using artificial intelligence, business-to-business integration in the consumer industry, and worldwide shipping and... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

1:30pm CDT

A Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)-Based ERP
An ERP is designed to serve organizations from end-to-end, meeting customers’ needs, demand from marketing, and, on the financial side, from order to billing. An end-to-end ERP usually has hundreds of functions. The current on-premise based ERPs—or SaaS-based ERPs—are either charging the end-user based on the number of licenses or through limited subscriptions, making scalability a tough business decision for the organizations. In addition, scalability is hardly justifiable financially since only a certain percentage of the functions of an on-premise ERP or SaaS-based ERP are being used by the end-users. A FaaS-based ERP (Function as a Service) fills the gaps from both scalability and flexible consumption from a pure pay-per-use perspective.

This presentation is a discussion of the serverless architecture being applied to build a FaaS-based ERP, including abstraction of servers, flexible consumption and executions on functions, and services being instantaneously scalable. It will also elaborate the type of ERP functions, such as process a web request, queue messages, and scheduled jobs and tasks from implementation perspective. The quality attribute requirements (such as for performance, security, modifiability, and reliability) will be highlighted to describe the benefits and potential setbacks since not every ERP function is good fit for FaaS.

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Speakers
avatar for Charles Chow

Charles Chow

Deloitte Consulting LLP
Charles Chow is an enterprise software and systems executive with 25 years of technology transformation experience. Charles is with Deloitte’s Technology, Media, and Telecom sectors. Before joining Deloitte, he led multiple large programs with Fortune 500 companies, revamped a Digit... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:45pm CDT

Panel: Death of the Architect
For a long time, various architect titles have been used across the industry, but the roles and responsibilities of the architect have never been very clear. In several places, architects have moved away from engineering responsibilities, forcing some of the brightest engineers to perform tasks that didn't quite require engineering skills or the appetite to learn new technologies. More recently, in many organizations, architecture is becoming a shared concern. In this panel, we'll debate what's happening to the role of software architect and how teams should make important crosscutting design decisions.
 
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Moderators
avatar for Paulo Merson

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)
Paulo Merson has been programming in the small and programming in the large for over 30 years. Paulo is a software developer at the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts. He is a Visiting Scientist with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a certified instructor for Arcitura, and... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Tracy Bannon

Tracy Bannon

Senior Principal - Software Architect & Dev*Ops Advisor, The MITRE Corporation
Passionate Architect!!! Tracy (Trac) Bannon is a Senior Principal in MITRE Corporation’s Advanced Software Innovation Center. She is an accomplished software architect, engineer, and DevSecOps advisor having worked across commercial and government clients.She is a passionate architect... Read More →
avatar for George Fairbanks

George Fairbanks

Google
George Fairbanks is a software engineer with academic leanings. His formative years were in the object-oriented world of Smalltalk, UML, and design patterns. He received a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he learned software architecture from David... Read More →
avatar for Yogeshwar Srikrishnan

Yogeshwar Srikrishnan

Homeaway (Expedia)
Yogeshwar Srikrishnan is a seasoned engineer and enterprise architect with significant experience in design and delivery of business-critical solutions. Srikrishnan, who enjoys working with business and technical teams in solving challenges, specializes in service-oriented architecture... Read More →
avatar for Eoin Woods

Eoin Woods

Endava
Eoin Woods is the CTO of Endava, a technology company that delivers projects in the areas of digital, agile and automation. Prior to joining Endava, Eoin has worked in the software engineering industry for 20 years developing system software products and complex applications in the... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 1:45pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report, Panel

2:00pm CDT

Changing the World a Service at a Time: A Tale of the Transition of a Large-Scale Data Processing System to an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS Paradigm
As technology has shifted from monolithic systems to SOA to cloud-based microservice architectures, so have customer expectations. This is the tale of how one customer revolutionized a particular domain by breaking down monolithic, single-contract systems and migrating to an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS/Application multi-contract ecosystem. It is told from the point of view of a software architect. The cast includes multiple development contractors, customer organizations, technology experts, and operations organizations.

The story begins with an early concept phase kickoff by the customer more than 18 months ago and takes us through early program milestone design reviews. Like everything in software architecture, it is not just about the technical challenges. Revolutionary changes such as this interweave technical, social, and political challenges throughout. Each phase of the story includes these challenges and how they are addressed through a combination of domain knowledge, applied soft skills, and technical tools (Quality Attribute Workshops, domain models, UML-like diagrams, DoDAF views, and user experience workflow brainstorming). As the revolution is not complete, this chapter of the story will end with a summary of even more challenges to be addressed.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
GT

Gerry Tucker

Raytheon
Gerry Tucker holds an SEI Software Architecture Professional certificate. He has served in the role of a software architect for 10 years on large-scale development programs. He brings a passion and excitement to the job and enjoys sharing the challenges experienced and lessons learned... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

2:00pm CDT

Fixing Under Fire
We’ve discovered that 2 a.m. is a bad time to fix your service. Over the past year, we learned that some of our design decisions actively harmed visibility—late-night pages were more painful than they had to be. In response to this, we evolved our architecture to make our microservices better and ease our immediate (sleepless) pain.

By the end of this talk, you’ll know the questions you need to ask when designing a highly available, cloud-based, fine-grained SOA system to improve visibility, diagnose-ability, and developer happiness. You’ll also have a starting point for answering these questions based on our experiences: How do you get good information, indicating the problem source across microservices? How do you determine the tradeoff between quickly resolving the problem and collecting the information needed to address the root cause? And how do you provide enough information to come back later and fix the underlying problem?

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
AG

Aiton Goldman

IBM Watson
avatar for Michael Lipschultz

Michael Lipschultz

IBM Watson
Michael Lipschultz is a software engineer in IBM Watson, focused on AI-enhanced information retrieval solutions for the Watson Discovery Service. He has experience with user modeling and adaptation, natural language processing, and data analysis. Michael has a BS in computer science... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

2:00pm CDT

From Mainframes to Microservices: Lessons Learned in Modernizing High-Demand Applications
What if you have to replace an application processing hundreds of millions of documents per day for a government agency or health-care provider? Is it possible to choose microservices and still achieve the same stability as software that has been optimized continually over a 25-year life span? What are the factors to consider in defining the architecture to meet this challenge?

Join us as we discuss our experiences in the government and health-care industries, successfully using microservices to replace mainframe capabilities. How did we find our answers to these questions?
  • What is the domain and problem to solve? When is it best to apply a microservice pattern, and when is it best to use other architecture patterns?
  • What can we learn from how the mainframe application solved the problem?
  • Where are the seams in the system? How did we use those? What application modernization patterns did we apply where, and why?
  • What quality attributes were required? Could microservices using commodity or cloud platforms really do the job as fast and reliably as the mainframe, while introducing network communications overhead?
  • What DevOps methods and tools did we apply to be confident that the microservices would really do the job and not risk the agency or enterprise mission?

See the slides.

Watch the slides.

Speakers
avatar for Lori Olson

Lori Olson

Deloitte Consulting LLP
As a specialist leader for Deloitte Consulting, Lori Olson is an experienced software systems architect with a demonstrated history of delivering large, highly scalable solutions and systems in multiple industries. She has delivered hosted solutions and SaaS using IaaS, Agile, DevOps... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

3:00pm CDT

How to Measure Anything! ... Or Actually Just Quality Attributes
Quality attributes are at the heart of software architecture, yet without concrete metrics they can be abstract and have less business value. Some quality attributes, such as availability, have well-understood and straightforward ways to measure how well a system is doing. Others—such as maintainability, security, or interoperability—are arguably more vague and hard for which to find objective metrics.

This creates a problem. If we don’t measure them, how do we know if we’re getting better or, worse, going backward? How do we convince our stakeholders to invest time and money in quality? How can we justify the tradeoffs we make?

In 2007, Douglas W. Hubbard released How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. It posits that anything can be measured, including topics that many have previously considered immeasurable, such as customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility, and technology risk.

This talk brings Hubbard’s approach to software architecture. The underlying strategies can be applied to quality attributes: real-world examples will illustrate how any quality attribute can be measured in different contexts and team environments. The talk also covers how to have conversations with stakeholders about quality attributes and make them a first-class concern in the software development process.
See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Sebastian von Conrad

Sebastian von Conrad

Culture Amp
Sebastian is currently director of engineering at Culture Amp and until recently led the software architecture efforts at Envato, both of which are among Australia’s most successful tech companies. He is a former software engineering manager and software engineer and an award-winning... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:00pm - 3:45pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

3:00pm CDT

Refactoring to Functional Architecture Patterns
Last year at SATURN I spoke about ideas from the functional programming (FP) community that are relevant to software architecture. This talk is a 45-minute experience report based on applying those ideas and represents one way to marry functional programming with traditional OO design advice.

We followed a pattern we call the Rich Service layer. It is implemented as pure functions plus a modified version of what Fowler calls an Anemic Domain Model. Historically, the Transaction Script pattern has been contrasted with the Domain Model pattern, where objects have methods expressing the business logic.

Our domain model expresses strictly defined types with as little optional data as possible, not just jumbled data bags. Our domain types are as strictly defined as possible. We check integrity at the system boundary. Compared to object-oriented programming, we don’t push much behavior onto the types, which are immutable. We grew an (internal) Domain Specific Language (DSL) organically so the code reads naturally. But the DSL mainly expresses predicates on state rather than mutations. There is little business logic, which is instead in functions in the rich service layer.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for George Fairbanks

George Fairbanks

Google
George Fairbanks is a software engineer with academic leanings. His formative years were in the object-oriented world of Smalltalk, UML, and design patterns. He received a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he learned software architecture from David... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:00pm - 3:45pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

3:00pm CDT

Reactive DDD: Modeling Uncertainty
The foundational ideas behind domain-driven design, or DDD, are fundamentally the same as when Eric Evans brought them to our attention through his seminal work. The Bounded Context with its Ubiquitous Language is still of chief importance, along with mapping various Bounded Contexts to form a whole system solution. What has changed is that software is now vastly distributed and designed with reactive properties, such as being message and event driven. This talk addresses the current competing forces in industry, and how the uncertainty introduced by distributed computing can be finessed into highly functioning, business-centric systems that teams can design, develop, and reason about.
Watch the video.
See the slides.
 
Speakers
avatar for Vaughn Vernon

Vaughn Vernon

For Comprehension Inc.
Vaughn Vernon is a software developer and architect with more than 30 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design and a thought leader in software simplification. He consults and teaches around Domain-Driven Design and... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Invited Speaker

3:00pm CDT

Being Agile About Architecture
Being Agile, with its attention to extensive testing, frequent integration, and focusing on important product features, has proven invaluable to many software teams. When building complex systems, it can be all too easy to primarily focus on features and overlook software qualities, specifically those related to the architecture. Some believe that by simply following Agile practices—starting as fast as possible, keeping code clean, and having lots of tests—a good architecture will magically emerge. While an architecture will emerge, if there is not enough attention paid to it and the code, technical debt and design problems will creep in until it becomes muddy, making it hard to deliver new features quickly and reliably.
It is essential to have a sustainable architecture that can evolve through the project lifecycle. Sustainable architecture requires ongoing attention, especially when there are evolving priorities, a lot of technical risk, and many dependencies. This talk presents a set of patterns that focus on practices for creating and evolving a software architecture while being Agile. These practices include a set of tools that allow teams to define “enough” architecture in the beginning of the project and to manage the state and the evolution of the architecture as the project evolves.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Joseph Yoder

Joseph Yoder

The Refactory
Joe Yoder (agilist, computer scientist, speaker, and pattern author) is the founder and principal of The Refactory, a company focused on software architecture, design, implementation, consulting, and mentoring on all facets of software development. Joe is president of the board of... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:00pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie E Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

3:45pm CDT

Industrial Experiences with Automated Software Architecture Measurement
In this experience report, we present our experiences of creating, evolving, and validating an automated software architecture measurement system in two large multinational corporations. We will describe the measures that we employed and the tool chains that we constructed to automatically calculate these measures. We will also describe how we got the development teams to accept and apply these measures through pilot studies, surveys, constantly adjusting the measures based on feedback, and correlations with productivity measures. Our experience shows that it is critical to guide the development teams to focus on the underlying problems behind each measure, rather than on the score itself. It is also critical to adopt and recommend state-of-the-art technologies to the development teams. In doing so, they can leverage these technologies to pinpoint, visualize, and quantify architecture problems.
Watch the video.See the slides.
Speakers
avatar for Yuanfang Cai

Yuanfang Cai

Associate Professor, Drexel University
Dr. Yuanfang Cai is currently an Associate Professor at Drexel University, USA. In 2006, Dr. Cai received her Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia. Dr. Cai’s research focuses on software design, software architecture, software evolution, and software economics... Read More →
avatar for Rick Kazman

Rick Kazman

Software Engineering Institute/University of Hawaii
Rick Kazman is a professor at the University of Hawaii and a research scientist at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Kazman has created several influential methods and tools for architecture analysis, including the Software Architecture Analysis Method... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:45pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

3:45pm CDT

Orchestrating AWS Lambda with Step Functions
Serverless and AWS Lambda specifically allow developers to build super-scalable application components with minimal effort. AWS Kinesis and SQS can be used to create a universal event stream to orchestrate Lambdas into much more complex applications. Now, with AWS Step Functions we can build large distributed applications with Lambdas using visual workflows. In this talk, I will show how Step Functions are different from Amazon Simple Workflow, how to get started with Step Functions, and how to use them to take your Lambda-based applications to the next level. We will start with a few granular functions and stitch them up using Step Functions. As we build out the application, we’ll add monitoring so we can ensure that changes we make actually improve it rather than make it worse. You will leave the session with actionable learnings about how to use AWS Step Functions in your environment right away.
See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Matt Williams

Matt Williams

Datadog
Matt Williams is the DevOps evangelist at Datadog and an organizer for DevOps Days Boston. He is passionate about the power of monitoring and metrics to make large-scale systems stable and manageable, so he tours the country speaking and writing about monitoring with Datadog. When... Read More →

Wednesday May 9, 2018 3:45pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

4:45pm CDT

Fish Sticks Comedy at SATURN 2018!
Join us to watch the Fish Sticks Comedy folks perform improv skits based on software architecture!
Wednesday May 9, 2018 4:45pm - 5:45pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session
 
Thursday, May 10
 

8:30am CDT

Morning Remarks
Thursday May 10, 2018 8:30am - 9:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

9:00am CDT

Slide Roulette!
Unwind and have a little fun with your fellow SATURN attendees during this improvisational presentation game! A selection of random slide decks will be prepared in advance to be presented by brave volunteers. Fame and prizes await those who seize the day!

Rules:
  1. The presenter cannot see the slides before presenting.
  2. The presenter delivers each slide in succession without skipping slides or going back.
  3. The presentation ends when all slides are presented, or after 6 minutes, whichever comes first.

Sign-up sheets will be available near the Registration Table.
Thursday May 10, 2018 9:00am - 9:30am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

9:30am CDT

Linda Northrop Software Architecture Award Winner: Software Architecture as Systems Dissolve
Software architecture has been a mainstream discipline since the 1990s and in that time has become a recognized, widely researched, and often valued part of the software engineering process. However, architecture approaches must reflect the technologies and priorities of the systems we are building, and in this regard its future has never looked more uncertain or more exciting. From our history of monolithic compile-time architecture, to many-tiered distributed systems, to Internet-connected services, we are now entering the era of cloud-hosted, microservice-based, pay-for-usage systems development. In this new world, the boundaries of “my” system are no longer so clear, and our systems are dissolving into complex webs of independently owned and evolved services, with nothing more in common than a shared credit card for billing and an agreement on the format of network requests. What can the history of software architecture tell us about the likely challenges in this environment? And how must it develop in order to meet them?
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Eoin Woods

Eoin Woods

Endava
Eoin Woods is the CTO of Endava, a technology company that delivers projects in the areas of digital, agile and automation. Prior to joining Endava, Eoin has worked in the software engineering industry for 20 years developing system software products and complex applications in the... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 9:30am - 10:00am CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

10:30am CDT

Architecture of the CARUSO Ecosystem: Bringing a Marketplace for Car-Related Data and Services Up to Speed
CARUSO is a neutral B2B data and service marketplace around telematics services for drivers, vehicles, and fleets of vehicles. Thus, CARUSO establishes an ecosystem of parts suppliers, workshops, trade organizations, insurances, fleet and leasing organizations, and other companies in the automotive aftermarket. Building up the ecosystem is a key cornerstone of the digital transformation of a traditional industry. This comes with many unknowns and requires a high degree of flexibility.

This talk shares architecture experiences from establishing the ecosystem in the constant tension of business, legal, and technology. The way to a successful ecosystem leads through many experiments and requires constant revision of decisions. Key challenges are the openness of the ecosystem with high security and trust at the same time. Further, growing an ecosystem first requires a set of high quality offerings in the marketplace; there is a continuous need to align the onboarded partners’ offering and consuming data and services. The ecosystem needs to be attractive for new partners, in particular in the early phase of startup.

The objective of this talk is to share experiences about ecosystem architecture that go far beyond technical architecture aspects.

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Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Jens Knodel

Jens Knodel

Caruso GmbH
Jens Knodel is the chief ecosystem architect of CARUSO and heads the business architecture team. He is particularly involved in the acquisition and onboarding of new partners in the ecosystem. Knodel has more than 15 years’ experience in software architecture research and practice... Read More →
avatar for Matthias Naab

Matthias Naab

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Matthias Naab is a software architect at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and heads the department for architecture-centric engineering. He is responsible for the development of architecture methods and consulting projects... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

10:30am CDT

Handling Personal Information in LinkedIn's Content Ingestion System
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 530 million members. Over 70% of LinkedIn’s members reside outside the U.S. This talk will describe some of the challenges relating to handling our members' personal information.

This talk will explore the technological issues involved with removing all personally identifiable information (PII) when a member closes their account in the context of LinkedIn's content ingestion system. This project's scope includes production databases, backups, streaming messages, offline ETL data, and derived datasets.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for David Max

David Max

LinkedIn
David Max is a software engineer at LinkedIn, where he helps build software systems to connect the world’s professionals and create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. He has an MS degree in computer science from New York University and a BS degree in... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

10:30am CDT

Managing Data Consistency in a Microservice Architecture Using Sagas
The services in a microservice architecture must be loosely coupled and so cannot share database tables. What’s more, two-phase commit (aka a distributed transaction) is not a viable option for modern applications. Consequently, a microservices application must use the Saga pattern, which maintains data consistency using a series of local transactions.

In this presentation, you will learn how sagas work and how they differ from traditional transactions. We describe how to use sagas to develop business logic in a microservices application. You will learn effective techniques for orchestrating sagas and how to use messaging for reliability. We will describe the design of a saga framework for Java and show a sample application.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Chris Richardson

Chris Richardson

Eventuate
Chris Richardson is a developer and architect. He is a Java Champion, a JavaOne rock star, and the author of POJOs in Action, which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris was also the founder of the original CloudFoundry.com... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 10:30am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Invited Speaker

11:15am CDT

A Journey to the Center of the Clouds
In this experience report, I will share the journey of Statoil toward the adoption of modern IT technologies and architecture patterns like cloud computing, machine learning, and microservices. We are seeing the the start of a new IT platform—one based on cloud technologies that will allow more operating freedom from vendors, who traditionally have dominated  IT landscapes. In this experience report, I will share the path we have taken and the obstacles we have navigated as well as the architecture and technology choices we have made. As far as I can, I will leave out specific branding and focus on the functionality of the chosen solutions. Join me to hear our experiences from this transformational journey.

See the slides.
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Speakers
avatar for Jørn Ølmheim

Jørn Ølmheim

Leading Advisor, Statoil ASA
Jørn Ølmheim is a practicing software professional with strong interest in open source, internet technology, and programming languages. He currently is data and solution architect at Statoil, focusing on software architecture and systems integration challenges. Statoil ASA is the... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Experience Report

11:15am CDT

Architecture Principles for Data Privacy of Cloud-Based Medical-Device Services
The European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) adds to the varying data privacy laws and regulations of multiple countries and regions. This presentation describes architecture principles for addressing the data privacy requirements sufficiently enough to operate these products in most of the global regions, not having region/country specific implementations but only regional deployment and configuration—enabling alignment among various cloud products (saving development and operation costs).

The architecture aspects addressed include solutions for data classification, data residency, encryption, anonymization/pseudonymization, key management, user residency and user access control/identity management, consent management, audit trail, data breach detection/data loss prevention, storage redundancy/backup-restore, portability, and data subject related functionality (e.g., erasure of personal data).

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Speakers
avatar for Andrzej Knafel

Andrzej Knafel

Roche Diagnostics International Ltd
Andrzej Knafel is chief software architect at Roche Diagnostics International Ltd. in Switzerland. He has led international teams and multisite software development projects with a focus on automation, connectivity, security, and data management in health-care applications. Knafel... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

Are Containers the New Golden Hammer?
The container ecosystem is growing rapidly, and there is a rush to adopt this technology even as vendors standardize. Many enterprise implementations run the risk of falling into the golden hammer anti-pattern by applying it whenever and wherever possible. Join this talk for a deep dive to establish a common taxonomy and definition of containers, investigate practical use cases, and identify key components and decisions points for creating a container strategy. Containers are often treated like virtual machines, when there are so many richer capabilities possible.

Participants will learn what using containers solves—and doesn’t solve; key concepts for architecting containers and effective layering decisions; tried and true architectural techniques for working with container-driven architectures versus new tools and their value (PaaS, orchestration, managers); managing and maintaining containers (tools can’t replace strategy even if they reduce complexity—it’s never as simple as “just change a layer”); and practical tips from the field.

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Speakers
avatar for Tracy Bannon

Tracy Bannon

Senior Principal - Software Architect & Dev*Ops Advisor, The MITRE Corporation
Passionate Architect!!! Tracy (Trac) Bannon is a Senior Principal in MITRE Corporation’s Advanced Software Innovation Center. She is an accomplished software architect, engineer, and DevSecOps advisor having worked across commercial and government clients.She is a passionate architect... Read More →
avatar for Lori Olson

Lori Olson

Deloitte Consulting LLP
As a specialist leader for Deloitte Consulting, Lori Olson is an experienced software systems architect with a demonstrated history of delivering large, highly scalable solutions and systems in multiple industries. She has delivered hosted solutions and SaaS using IaaS, Agile, DevOps... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

Feed Your Inner Data Scientist: JavaScript Tools for Data Visualization and Filtering
It seems like a new JavaScript framework is created every day. Keeping up with them can be overwhelming. This session covers some JavaScript libraries that will make analyzing and displaying data a snap. We will consider D3.js, CrossFilter.js, DC.js, and jQuery DataTables. These are very robust community supported libraries. Use them in client applications to add interactive visualizations and data analysis tools.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Doug Mair

Doug Mair

Improving Enterprises
Doug Mair is a principal consultant at Improving Enterprises in Columbus, Ohio. He started developing software as a high school freshman on a TRS-80 16K. He loved programming so much that he decided to get a BS in Computer and Information Science  from Ohio State University. Since... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

1:00pm CDT

The Ethical Software Architect
As the prison sentence of Volkswagen engineer James Liang has shown, software architecture can have far-reaching legal and ethical consequences. And although few architects will ever be involved in ethical dilemmas of the magnitude Mr. Liang had to deal with, most of us will at some time or other be involved in architectural choices with ethical impact. As software becomes ubiquitous, its impact on privacy, transparency, equality, or general happiness and well-being of people is felt by everyone.

In this interactive tutorial, presenters Eltjo Poort and Michael Keeling will first explain why architects should care about ethics, and then hand them some tools to help navigate the quagmire of ethical dilemmas. Together, we will explore some stories—scenarios that any software architect can run into in their daily work. At the end of the workshop, we will discuss ways in which we can all become more ethical software architects.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

IBM Watson
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at IBM, where he helps build Watson and has worked in the software industry for more than a decade. He is author of the book Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. Keeling has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →
avatar for Eltjo Poort

Eltjo Poort

CGI
Eltjo Poort is distinguished solution architect at CGI in The Netherlands. In his 30-year career in the software industry, he has fulfilled many engineering and project management roles. In the 1990s, he oversaw the implementation of the first SMS text messaging systems in the United... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 1:00pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie B Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Tutorial

1:45pm CDT

Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
Many companies manage all or part of their infrastructure via manual processes and/or very inflexible scripts. These manual processes are slow, error prone, hard to debug and impossible to validate. Documentation on the infrastructure is often missing or not up to date. Test and production environments tend to differ as more manual changes are applied to them. The knowledge on how to change the infrastructure is only in a few people’s head, making it hard for developers to deliver the functionality they need.

All these problems can be solved with code because code is powerful.

In this presentation, you will learn the benefits of using infrastructure as code, Terraform basics (providers, variables, outputs, data, resources, interpolation), and how to launch a web server using Terraform. There will be a hands-on session; participants will write Terraform code to deploy a new web app to EC2 with “Zero Down Time” deployments.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Arturo Pie

Arturo Pie

Nulogy
Arturo Pie is a software architect at Nulogy in Toronto, Ontario. He helps the company adopt more DevOps practices with the purpose of more rapidly and continuously delivering awesome customer outcomes. Pie has led the work on decreasing the runtime of the test suite to less than... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 1:45pm - 2:30pm CDT
Prairie A Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk

2:00pm CDT

Green Cloud: Sustainable Open Source Cloud Architecture on ARM64
Green clouds are based on cheap, low power chips that can be used to build clouds that are both low cost and low in power usage. You will learn how to build your containers for different chip architectures for virtually no extra cost using your existing CI infrastructure.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Speakers
avatar for Kurt T. Stam

Kurt T. Stam

Red Hat
Kurt Stam has been working in the enterprise integration space for two decades. He has designed and implemented integration solutions for high-volume distributed systems in the telecommunication, financial, and travel industries. He is a principal middleware developer at Red Hat... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 2:00pm - 2:15pm CDT
Prairie C Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Technical Talk, DEV@SATURN

2:45pm CDT

Keynote: Uncoupling
We overload our terms a lot in this industry. "Coupling" is one such. That word covers situations ranging from essential to accidental to comical to cosmic. Coupling seems to be the root of all ills. It is the molasses that slows our every move. And yet, in the industry from which we borrowed the term, "coupling" was not a dirty word. It meant something ingenious. Let us contemplate coupling for a time and see what we can do about it.

See the slides.
Watch the video.
Keynotes
avatar for Michael Nygard

Michael Nygard

Cognitect, Inc.
Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations... Read More →
Thursday May 10, 2018 2:45pm - 3:45pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Keynote

3:45pm CDT

Debrief of the Growing Great Software Designers Workshop
Since 2015, Michael and George have facilitated a workshop on the Monday before the SATURN Conference to bring together a group of interested and enthusiastic participants to focus on a topic that is emerging as important for software architects. The topic for 2018, Growing Great Software Designers, provided an opportunity to share what we have learned and are applying in our day jobs. Invited participants heard and shared stories of valiant attempts, grand strategies, energizing wins, and humbling defeats in this area. At the end of the workshop, the group worked to generalize and distill their discussions so that others can benefit from them. This debrief of the workshop will share with the SATURN community those suggestions, practices, ah-ha! moments, and challenges that must be overcome in today’s software shops.
Watch the video.

See the slides.
Speakers
avatar for George Fairbanks

George Fairbanks

Google
George Fairbanks is a software engineer with academic leanings. His formative years were in the object-oriented world of Smalltalk, UML, and design patterns. He received a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he learned software architecture from David... Read More →
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

IBM Watson
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at IBM, where he helps build Watson and has worked in the software industry for more than a decade. He is author of the book Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. Keeling has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →

Thursday May 10, 2018 3:45pm - 4:15pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session

4:15pm CDT

Closing Remarks, Conference Awards
Thursday May 10, 2018 4:15pm - 4:30pm CDT
Prairie D Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park
  Plenary Session
 
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  • Course
  • Experience Report
  • Invited Speaker
  • Keynote
  • Plenary Session
  • Reception
  • Technical Talk
  • Tutorial
  • Workshop
    • Fire Pit
    Prairie A
    Prairie B
    Prairie C
    Prairie D
    Prairie E