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WICSA 2014 Industry Day

Welcome to the WICSA 2014 Industry Day pages. We've assembled a program including a variety of speakers who will address various aspects of scalability in building contemporary software systems. The scale of modern systems is growing rapidly, and it's crucial for the discipline of software arhitecture to extend our fundamental principles and methods to tackle this exponential growth in systems complexity. We beleieve the program for this day will inspire new thinking and discussions that will drive new innovations in software architecture ove rteh next decade.

The Industry Day schedule will be availble here shortly. In addition to the high quality speaker program, we'll end the day with a panel on the subject of 'The Relevance of Academic Research to Software Architecture Advances', This promises to be an entertaining and thought-provoking session. 

Date:  Thursday, 10th April 2014

The program schedule of industry day is shown below.

8:45-10:00

Welcome and Keynote: Jim Webber. Neo Technologies

10:00-10:30

Saul Caganoff, CTO Sixtree

10:30-11:00

Break

11:00

Quinton Anderson, CBA

11:30

Christopher Rodrigues, Department of Defense

12:00

Trevor Warren, Accenture

12:30-1:30

lunch

1:30

Steve Parry, Citrix

2:00

Franc Carter, SIRCA

2:30

Liam O'Brien, Geosciences Australia

3:00-3:30

coffee

3:30-5:00

Panel: Relevance of Academic Research to Industrial Practice

Participants to be announced

Keynote

Morning Keynote: Dr Jim Webber, Chief Scientist, Neo Technology

Surfing the Infinite Monkey Theorem for Fun and Profit

Neo4j is the world's leading graph database. It's core strengths are its extensively production-hardened code and an large and enthusiastic community of users and contributors. Still, Neo4j is a commercial open source database and its users must, rightly, be able to depend on it to run their own sophisticated business systems, processes and data analyses. Because of this, there exists a tension between the expectations open-source user community users and contributors, and the technology media who, generally, require exciting new features to solve their emergent problems pitted against enterprise users who expect their deployments to be long-lived and unexciting. In the middle of all this is a commercial entity, Neo Technology, whose job is to plot a sane course for the software through the commercial quagmire, maze of open source, the court of public opinion and ultimately towards a sustainable software architecture for the future. 

Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open source graph database Neo4j, where he where he works on R&D for highly scalable graph databases and writes open source software. Jim has written two books on integration and distributed systems: “Developing Enterprise Web Services” on XML Web Services and “REST in Practice” on using the Web for building large-scale systems. His latest book is “Graph Databases” which focuses on the Neo4j database. His blog is located at http://jimwebber.org and he tweets often @jimwebber.

Programme

Dr Saul Caganoff, CTO, Sixtree 

Event Driven Architectures for new Business Solutions

Mobile, social and analytics are converging to drive real-time sense and respond business requirements based on events. Commensurately, new programming patterns and platforms for asynchronous, event-driven programming are emerging to meet the demand. Events represent activities that happen outside your data centre - in the real world - which have an impact on your business, on your customers, suppliers and employees. This presentation describes the key elements of event-driven architectures for large scale integration or event processing solutions. The combination of integration technology, rules engines and distributed in-memory databases provides a scalable and flexible architecture for a wide range of requirements. However state management is an important consideration and becomes a key trade-off between competing requirements for horizontal scalability and application consistency. 

We also present case-studies and from a number of event-driven solutions in telecommunications, utilities, and government. These case studies offer insights into how event driven architectures can support legacy modernization, SaaS integration, energy efficiency and social marketing.

Dr Saul Caganoff has over twenty years experience in information technology, building distributed, composite solutions to support business operations in major enterprises across finance, telecommunications, energy and government. Dr Caganoff works mostly with service-oriented and event-driven architectures as key paradigms for building scalable, reliable and maintainable systems. Dr Caganoff is CTO at Sixtree an Australian consultancy, he has a BSc from University of Sydney and a PhD from The Australian National University.

 

 

Quinton Anderson, Commonwealth Bank

Data Science at Scale – Architectural Considerations from the Trenches

A key use case for Hadoop is that of data science. Data science is a widely overloaded term however it is clear that it has something to do with the scientific process which is inherently exploratory, non-deterministic and involves little or no certainty with regards to outcome. Typically in environments of uncertainty lean and agile principles are applied, however at certain levels of abstraction this approach simply becomes untenable give the volume of data typically associated with the modern multi-national or web company. At some level, strong architectural elements and patterns must exist that enable fast iteration, experimentation and change as hypotheses are defined and tested at a different level. This talk explores the roles of science and engineering in environments who's primary use case is data science given some more concrete business requirements. Architecture elements of the hadoop ecosystem are discussed within this context, from lower level concerns of multi-tenancy through operationally significant elements of data model representation, model, load and management through data science concerns of feature engineering, data analysis, mining and model creation, finally ending with business service integration concerns and model scoring considerations. This presentation will be geared towards patterns that are appropriate within the context of financial services and other environments that are subject to regulatory constraints. This walk will be valuable for architects attempting to deliver hadoop based capabilities and equally for data scientists who are interested in the computational and operational considerations of data science at scale on hadoop.

Quinton Anderson is currently the development manager with technical responsibility for the big data and data science platform at one of the world's largest banking groups. He has a background is systems engineering contributes widely to various open source initiatives. He has also published a cookbook on Twitter Storm with a focus on Lambda Architecture and Continuous delivery of Realtime big data solutions.  

 

Trevor Warren, Accenture

Challenges Engineering Applications for High Performance

Todays Web 2.0 applications are a complex heterogeneous mix of different technologies consuming services within the enterprise and over the internet. Building and delivering such complex applications that perform requires the right rigour, processes, capability and governance from a Performance Engineering standpoint across the Software Development Life Cycle. Such capability is not just rare to find it’s also rarely appreciated if & when found. The appreciation of Proactive Performance across the SDLC is generally low across the industry resulting in programs delivering applications that mostly meet their Functional Requirements but are quite far from meeting their Non Functional Requirements (if they even exist). As part of this talk we’ll cover challenges the industry faces across the various phases of the Software Development Lifecycle and the various techniques/tools at hand to avoid getting into those nasty situations towards the tail end of programs.

 

Christopher Rodrigues Macias, Department of Defence

ICT Security and National Security – Developing a Security Architecture for the Australian Department of Defence

The Australian Department of Defence is currently undergoing a transition that most organisations went through some fifteen years ago: consolidating diverse, dispersed silos of ICT infrastructure and applications, and bringing them under the governance of a single internal ‘shared service provider’ known as CIO Group. This transition requires Defence to make a step change in all aspects of ICT security. We have had to locate all the hundreds of server ‘closets’, ad hoc LANs and old, unsupported software across a large, geographically dispersed organisation, and plan how to bring it all together. For Defence, IT security is a strategic concern with national security implications. So we have to do this in a way that does not (further) compromise the organisation’s security. And, unfortunately, Defence started to make this shift with an ICT organisation whose security systems, practices and policies were in some places as outdated and primitive as the aging networks they were designed to protect.

This presentation focuses on just one key aspect of planning Defence’s ICT transition: the security architecture that defines the ‘target state’ for ICT security in Defence. It discusses:

  • key features and constraints of the Defence ICT environment
  • the intent of the security architecture
  • the business-focused process used to develop the architecture
  • the major components of the architecture and their relationships
  • the challenges of applying/implementing the security architecture in an organisation undergoing rapid business and ICT change

Christopher Rodrigues Macias is the Assistant Secretary for ICT Strategy and Architecture for the Australian Department of Defence. Christopher has been working in ICT for over 25 years in roles including software developer, technical team lead, project manager, architect, strategist and senior executive. Before joining the public service he served as a consultant in organisations including the U.S Department of State, Nykredit Bank, KPMG Peat Marwick, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the U.S. intelligence community.

 

Dr Liam O’Brien, Geosciences Australia

Scalability in Data Intensive Scientific Software Systems

This talk gives an overview of work on decomposition of systems to improve their scalability and application to data intensive computing as well as decomposition of data to make it easier to process the data using high performance computing (HPC). The talk also gives an overview of work currently being undertaken in GA around the use of tiling systems, the development of a data cube and the use of web services and cloud computing as well as an overview of previous work by the presenter at CSIRO around decomposing systems into services and deployment of multiple instances of these services in the cloud. The talk also discusses other issues such as the use of cloud for data intensive software systems, scalability and evaluation of the cloud and skills requirements for architects involved in Data Intensive software systems.

Dr Liam O’ Brien has over 25 years’ experience in research and development in software engineering and in more recently in the practical application to build the architectures for data intensive software systems. He is a Solution and Applications Architect with Geoscience Australia and was previously Chief Software Architect with CSIRO and a Principal Researcher at NICTA’s e-Government Initiative. He is also a Member-at-Large of the Service Science Society Australia which he co-founded in 2010. He has previously worked as a researcher with Lero (Ireland), Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (USA), CSIRO (Australia) and the University of Limerick (Ireland). He currently builds solution architectures for software systems for discovery, delivery, processing and sharing of data. His main areas of research include enterprise architecture, software and systems architecture, SOA, service science, software reuse, software modernisation, and cloud computing. He holds a BSc and PhD from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is a member of the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society and the Australian Computer Society.

 

Dr Steve Parry, Citrix

Innovation at Citrix

Innovation at Citrix comes from many places, and within Citrix Labs we are at the forefront of this activity. This presentation will give you an overview of the innovation engine in Citrix and how Citrix Labs contributes to the technical vision of the company.  We will cover the process from our initial creation of our talking paper entitled “10 Year Technology Landscape”, through how we manage a global product ideas process, and then cover nearer term customer and partner interactions as well as our Technical Due Diligence activities during Mergers and Acquisitions. We will finish with our focus on investment activities in industry, our Start-up Accelerator facility and our academic sponsorships.

With almost 20 years in the IT industry, Dr Steve Parry has extensive experience in application development, delivery and support. Since 2002 Steve has been at Citrix driving a research and development team looking at technology futures beyond product roadmaps. In this role, Steve is involved in the incubation of new products and technologies from concept to first release, as well as raising the awareness of emerging technologies to Citrix employees, partners and customers. Steve’s formal educational background includes a PhD from Bath University, a Master’s of Science from Cranfield Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s of Engineering from Coventry Polytechnic.

 

Franc Carter, Sirca

Scaling Through Three Orders of Magnitude

Sirca is an independent and leading provider of online services to support finance and other Data intensive research at universities, government and financial market participants worldwide. Strong engineering principles and a deep understanding of data within the domain have enabled Sirca to deliver a significant history of fine grained financial data. This data is utilised by universities, financial institutions and regulators as a major enabler of their goals. Over the life of the product the database has grown from billions of records to trillions of records in response to growing financial data.

Sirca has been utilising the core concepts of parallelism, hashing, statelessness and asynchronous behaviour for over 14 years when the first architecture for the system was developed. The presentation will cover how these principles have benefited the system and why we see them as fundamental to being able to grow systems quickly at the appropriate time. We will also discuss some of the challenges we see to adopting these approaches.

Franc Carter is Sirca's Lead Architect, he has over 20 years of experience in roles that have straddled a mixture of Systems Administration and Development in environments with large scale distributed databases. Franc was heavily involved in the core architecture for Sirca's flagship system and has oversight for major enhancements to the system.