AWS Game Day - Decoupling for real world applications

The AWS Game Day on Decoupling is rather obtuse. For me the take away, for which I had to wait, step, gap, listen, connect the dots for the speakers on what they meant -

 

ah.. what they mean is that applications can be decoupled from the other layers... yes, that's called abstraction and the other part that they did not mention is the data concurrency of the data flows, synchronous versus asynchronous. That was the puzzle for me to figure out while listening to them.

 

I like their discussion to approach coupled versus decoupled messages, which is what we really call data flows.

 

They never got to a real world problems "use cases" to solve in the first 15 minutes, yet I'll just look at applications and their real world application. Regardless of the technology, the language, the infrastructure, we have a client and their needs.

 

1. client

2. needs

3. solution

4. support of #1 to #3

5. architecture of #1 through #4

6. framework of #3 and #4

7. time-frame, stability and longevity with metrics to measure success and improvement

 

all of the above must be laser focused on the mission - any questions?

 

Ah ha!.. at 18 minutes, use cases come into play. CMS? Sure. Old school, been around since 1992.

 

They did touch on cost per solutions which is very important linkage. For me, optimization of the solution to keep things as cost effective and efficient as possible is important.

 

They started to talk about decoupling their storage solutions as well, and RDS through Redis and ElastiCache. Very interesting indeed. The more layers away your team is away from the underlying solution requires you to have more understanding and patience of potential outages when another team, called AWS engineering rolls out an update in the underlying architecture. You have to know if its you or them that has caused the problem.

 

 What's important is at least Game Day is trying to introduce a conversation to the masses about AWS cloud solutions. Their view count is rather low on the YouTube videos and I know why - because they need to really hit the street fast and hard and give real world solutions really fast and leave the door open for alternate solutions. That would be ideal.

 

For them to showcase the entire array of AWS products would be cool too!! Just do it. Put up the AWS solutions page and chart and go through it. That would be really cool!!

 

I recall back in the 1990s, I attended a Learning Tree week long course on  Migrating Legacy Applications in Los Angeles at the Crown Royal Plaza and the Navy, Microsoft, USPS, and other big corporate types were there. The Game Day for Coupling and Decoupling could be done like they did at the LTI seminar and course. It was awesome!! Real world companies, representing real world solutions and problems and CORBA at the time was the buzzword, yet it's all the same, client/server migrate to SQS and SNS on steroids for today; given the right data flow diagram problem and solution.

 

 By the 50th minute, I believe they had their groove on and discussing decoupling in use cases that were applicable. They even joke about how streaming data is amazingly important to decouple and using caching and scaling to get the data in, and the process it later, and then get back to the client.

 

What comes up next they joke is how to make insecure apps and then secure them. Good stuff.

 

more to come...