
Flowers and HCM Systems Architecture.
(The following is a Guest post by Thomas Otter, Research Director @ Gartner, and fellow Enterprise Irregular.) I’ve tried this metaphor on several client calls recently, so let me inflict it on you too. Cactus via Flickr, the cc licence of Rodolfo Cartas thanks. In this architecture, everything is from one vendor, and integration with […]

How To Build an SOA Based, High Performance, Scalable and Reliable Twitter on Steroids
Over the past few days I have been having some issues with my Twitter account. Beyond the well known pauses in the service, outages, etc there are some less known but more annoying problems with twitter search. It turns out that many accounts don’t show up in search at all. Therefore, if you are one […]

The Evolution Of Reliability and High Availability
Over the last few decades, the technologies we used and the approaches we took to make our systems reliable have undergone a steady evolution. In some cases the technology has just gotten more reliable through quality control at the hardware level (consider an Intel Blade today compared to my 1986 Zenith 8088 that I wrote […]
High Availability Series: Series Outline
With all of the talk about reliability, or lack thereof, of SaaS and Cloud based applications, I thought I would write a series on designing applications to be Resilient and Highly Available. The series sort of started with this post “It’s Inadequate Design That Lets Systems Fail, Not Whether They Are SaaS or Deployed in […]

It’s Inadequate Design That Lets Systems Fail, Not Whether They Are SaaS or Deployed in The Cloud
There have been many high profile outages lately which have caught peoples attention. These failures are being used as an argument for why critical systems should remain internal and not be deployed as SaaS or in the Cloud. Some of these outages included Google App Engine’s performance issues in early July , Rackspace’s loss of […]

The Challenges of Allowing Offline Usage in a SaaS Based System
So I was reading an article recently about the latest Google Reader and how it still can’t be used offline with full features. In particular the article focuses on its inability to allow you to read articles offline and then flag those articles as already read, such that when you get back online Google Reader […]