How many times have you had to make software, or architecture decisions, based on the currently acceptable configuration of your servers and networks? What about being limited to the personal experience of key decision makers or influencers?
For some clarification, let me share some situations I have experienced in the last few years?
- You can’t use NoSQL (specifically Mongo) because we don’t know how to maintain it
- You can’t use Web API because we don’t want to open anything but port 80 from our DMZ
- You can’t use Python…it’s not in the stack of software we support
- I’ve never used what you are recommending, so we aren’t going to consider it because I don’t have time to come up to speed.
I can’t understand the code you are using, so, you can’t write things in that fashion.
There are many more examples I could give. This should communicate what I am driving at. Here are some things I have found would make some key changes in application designs.
- An understanding and implementation of Micro Services and a service bus architecture
- An understanding and infrastructure supporting cluster or load balancing like capabilities
- Key infrastructure services such as message queues, chron services, file storage, encryption, VPN, secure FTP, data caching service, to name a few
- Active Directory, LDAP, etc.
It’s when you are missing pieces of the systems architectural puzzle you begin to experience questions such as my previous editorial about long running processes on your IIS Service. The problem is not so much wrapped around using resources on the server as it is around the stability of the service. If your thread does not handle all exceptions, then, under windows, the IIS Process main thread will crash, and IIS will stop. This is not limited to a single App Pool. All App Pools are terminated.
What have you found missing that would have allowed you to provide a better solution? Share a comment, or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben