SATURN 2019: Full Schedule

8:30am EDT

DevOps Practices with Architecture: Deployment and Security

DevOps is a set of software development principles that emphasize collaboration, communication, and automation among all stakeholders, including IT operations, testers, developers, customers, and security personnel at the inception of a project. A variety of tools help stakeholders collaborate and communicate. Automation is a greater challenge. When our system architecture and cybersecurity controls limit what can be automated, we can’t move at DevOps speed. Teams must address this challenge at the beginning of a project and throughout the DevOps pipeline. This tutorial is designed for managers, developers, security, and operational teams and covers DevOps principles and processes for designing and building a secure development pipeline for project planning, gathering and meeting cybersecurity requirements, development, testing, and deployment from start to finish. You will learn about reference architectures and use cases for architectural design principles on continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery/deployment (CD), and continuous authorization (CA) tools and practices, including technical demonstrations and practical scenarios.

Day outline

Session 1: DevOps Foundations: Business, Culture, Communication, Architecture
Session 2: Infrastructure in DevOps: Environments, Tooling, Containers, Pipeline
Session 3: Continuous Process: Integration, Delivery and Deployment, Monitoring
Session 4: Security in DevOps: Process, Implementation, Demos
Takeaways

Speakers

Hasan Yasar

Software Engineering Institute

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

Monday May 6, 2019 8:30am - 4:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Course

8:30am EDT

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 Saga pattern, the Service Data Replication pattern ("cache"), CQRS, API gateway, design standards for REST APIs, asynchronous messaging patterns, and the use of DDD to model services to avoid distributed transactions.

We developed a simple and consistent design notation for the more than 45 design diagrams that 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.

Speakers

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 6, 2019 8:30am - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Course

8:30am EDT

Managing Technical Debt of Software

Technical debt occurs when a design or construction approach is taken that's expedient in the short term, but increases complexity and cost in the long term. In this course, the concept of technical debt is examined from multiple perspectives, including how it manifests, accumulates, and impacts the software development organization. If managed well, some technical debt can accelerate design exploration. Left unrecognized and unmanaged, accumulated technical debt results in increased development and sustainment costs. This 1-day course presents approaches to assess the technical debt landscape and teaches mechanisms by which it can be intentionally managed. The course will examine the importance of intentional and strategic management of technical debt that is supported by architecture-focused practices, and foster dialogue between business and technical decision makers.

Speakers

Ipek Ozkaya

Software Engineering Institute

Ipek Ozkaya is a principal member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Her work focuses on developing techniques for improving software development efficiency and system evolution with an emphasis on software architecture, software... Read More →

Monday May 6, 2019 8:30am - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Course

5:30pm EDT

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 6, 2019 5:30pm - 6:30pm EDT
Fountainview Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Reception

6:30pm EDT

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

John Klein

SATURN 2019 Technical Co-Chair, SEI

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 6, 2019 6:30pm - 8:00pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Boot Camp

8:30am EDT

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Tuesday May 7, 2019 8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session

9:00am EDT

Keynote: Autonomous Vehicle Safety and Perception Robustness Testing

Making self-driving cars safe will require a combination of techniques. ISO 26262 and the SAE's draft standards for safety of the intended function (SOTIF) will help with vehicle control and trajectory stages of the autonomy pipeline. Planning might be made safe using a doer/checker architectural pattern that uses deterministic safety envelope enforcement of non-deterministic planning algorithms. Machine-learning-based perception validation will be more problematic. We discuss the issue of perception edge cases, including the potentially heavy-tail distribution of object types and brittleness to slight variations in images. Our Hologram tool injects modest amounts of noise to cause perception failures, identifying brittle aspects of perception algorithms. More importantly, in practice it is able to identify context-dependent perception failures (e.g., false negatives) in unlabeled video that reveal systematic perception defects.

See the slides.

Keynote Speakers

Philip Koopman

Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Prof. Philip Koopman is a faculty member in the Carnegie Mellon University ECE department, with additional affiliations with the Institute for Software Research and the Robotics Institute. He leads research on safe and secure embedded systems and teaches cost-effective embedded system... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 9:00am - 10:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Keynote

10:30am EDT

OSDU and the Master Data Repository Pattern

The master data repository pattern originated from the need to separate master data lifecycle management from application-specific databases. Master data represents the business objects that define a sector or industry. In the upstream oil and gas industry, Well and Reservoir are good master data examples. In health care, Patient and Hospital are good examples, and in retail you find Item and Store. Master data objects share most of the characteristics found in domain-driven design entities. They have unique business-defined identity and lineage; that is, they can tell the story of their life. Where they differ is in scope. Domain-driven design teaches how to model entities in a bounded context. Master data objects are entities with global reach, spanning multiple bounded contexts.

Using Well as an example, during geo-modeling the well is defined as a trajectory from a place on the earth's surface to the reservoir with an expected production rate. The task is to find the best possible trajectory. During drilling the well is a trajectory, but now broken down into sections with operations and other attributes required by the construction process. In production the well consists of slots with estimated and measured rates. Historically these three aspects of a Well have been managed by at least three different applications and the data stored in at least three different data stores. The downside to this approach is lost lineage and even loss of identity across stores.

To harvest the value from analytics and machine learning, data must be freed from application-specific stores. The business case is flexible use of lifecycle data independent of lifecycle phase. For an oil company, using actual rates from existing wells when planning new wells has a lot of value. Understanding possible correlations between production rates and well designs becomes dollars on the bottom line. Known approaches to this challenge are data virtualization or the use of a data lake. The main shortcomings of these approaches are lack of lineage and mixed-up identities.

Master data objects are best understood as a graph of life events. The underpinning storage machinery must support this property. Client applications have access to three standardized groups of APIs: ingestion, search, and delivery. In terms of domain-driven design, we create a bounded context responsible for identity and lineage and call it the master data repository.

At the moment of writing, we know there are many challenges ahead. The first demonstration is planned for the end of January, with a working system for Well up and running by the end of Q1 2019 on both AWS and Azure.

As we see it, there are two innovations in play: the collaborative approach among competitors to establish a standard for their master data and the early involvement of global cloud providers to support the standards in their service offerings. Last, we think this pattern has potential within other sectors and are interested in hearing the voice of the SATURN audience.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Einar Landre

Equinor

Einar Landre has nearly 30 years of software experience. During the past 5 years, he has held the position as head of Statoil’s IT drilling and well services, an organization unit tasked to provide Statoil Drilling & Well with its IT solutions. Since April 2016 he has held the position... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Design Technique

10:30am EDT

The Testing Infrastructure Freeway: An Infrastructure Architect’s Journey

I will unpack the tensions architects have to manage when it comes to the needs and desires of various development and testing teams within an organization. I will discuss the journey I took moving from an application architect (who consumed infrastructure) to an infrastructure architect (who provided infrastructure for others to consume) and the framework to support both application and infrastructure architect needs (as well as development and testing teams desires).

Consider the Test Infrastructure as a Freeway approach! This talk is based on a blog post in which I explore this topic in my own career path. I will give real-world examples within a highly regulated financial services company (USAA) and how this approach has impacted developers and testers, support teams, and myself (the architect).

The approach is not about a particular technology, but rather the mental framework that can be utilized in any organization or technology stack. It can also be applied to other areas outside of testing architecture.

I will finish the talk discussing how the approach can impact other architects within an organization and how it helps to get those architects more focused on the quality attribute of testability for the applications they build.

I’d like for participants to walk away with the following:

Empathy as an architect for other’s needs
A mental framework that provides balance and room for experimentation and control where needed
Actionable next steps to institute the Testing Freeway in their own organizations

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Bryan Osterkamp

USAA

Bryan Osterkamp is a Technical Architect Principal at USAA. He owns the testing domain, with responsibility over testing infrastructure and automation tooling across all lines of business and technology stacks (6,000+ developers and testers). He provides technical oversight and guidance... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Testing/Quality

10:30am EDT

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; and how to record design decision in a simple and effective way.

Speakers

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)

Tuesday May 7, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Boot Camp, Documentation

10:30am EDT

Engineering Modern ML and Cloud Systems

In this talk, I’ll discuss my experiences in practice, the ongoing frustrations, and the challenges being faced in modern machine learning and cloud systems, with a focus on how software engineering can help us meet those challenges. In particular, I’ll describe the challenges of building real-world applications that involve machine learning and how practice is evolving to meet these challenges. This includes assurance, architecture, and practice. I’ll also explain how the widespread use of the cloud constrains design and the benefits and weaknesses of these constraints. I argue that software engineering has a role to play, perhaps more than ever, as modern practice evolves.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Tim Halloran

Google

Tim Halloran is a staff software engineer at Google Pittsburgh. He previously worked at the Java program verification startup SureLogic and spent 20 years developing software for the U.S. Air Force. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel. Tim has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, an M.S. in... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Invited Speaker

11:00am EDT

Data Necromancy: Bring Your Data Strategy Back from the Dead

The floor hummed with the electric energy of passion poured into code, quickly packaged and shipped to the customers in bold, shiny applications. Our story begins squeezed into the corner of this room—the data team. Analytics requirements were pushed out of the critical path for launches, slowly and then all at once. The data team is fighting against prioritization, cooperation, and, soon, relevance. This is sadly the state of many organizations, to a lesser or greater degree. How can we fix this? How can we bring our data strategy back from the dead?

Over the course of this talk, Bovard will draw upon his experience in a successful startup (Workiva) and Google to bring you a case study on an effective data strategy in the modern computing environment in three acts. Act I finds us venturing into the depths of the data dungeon to diagnose our data malaise. In Act II we begin the quest to gain business value and avoid the many pitfalls encountered along the way. Finally, in Act III we scale up and resurrect our data strategy. Will it be a glorious phoenix or Frankenstein’s monster? Tune in to find out!

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi

Senior Software Engineer, Google

Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi is a Senior Software Engineer at Google on the hardware cloud team. Previously he worked in a variety of roles at Workiva, a B2B startup. Bovard holds a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 11:00am - 11:30am EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Big Data

11:00am EDT

Impact of Functional Safety on Software Architecture

In this 30-minute technical talk, I will introduce the functional safety standard (ISO 26262) to the audience. I will also summarize the difference between functional safety and the safety quality attribute. Next, I will cover the concept of freedom from interference (FFI) and its importance to functionally safe software. Finally, I will explain the impact of the standard and FFI on software architecture.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Michael Turner

Software Architecture Technical Fellow, Visteon Corporation

Tuesday May 7, 2019 11:00am - 11:30am EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Safety

11:30am EDT

Measure Your Agile Architecture Maturity

Combining agile with architecture practices requires careful thought. At CGI, we have developed a maturity model for agile architecture, based on our ample experience tuning the architecture way of working to the agility required in different contexts.

The Agile Architecture Maturity Framework measures the architecture function’s maturity in an organization by looking at 11 key behaviors in four categories: understanding context, architectural decision making, validation, and fulfillment. The value of the architectural contribution depends on the proficiency and habits of those involved. Using this model, the maturity of the architecture function in an agile or traditional context can be measured by observing evidence and counter-evidence in daily practices. The knowledge gathered by applying the model is used to identify the most beneficial areas of improvement and to establish baselines and measure progress in improvement programs.

In this presentation, I will explain the principles and rationale behind this framework and report our experiences and lessons learned applying it in practice in three organizations. I will also share some behavior patterns we found, which many in the audience will recognize. It turns out that it is not easy to strike the right balance between traditional up-front architecture and the “agile overshoot.”

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Eltjo Poort

Solution Architect, CGI

Eltjo R. 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... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 11:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Agile Architecture

11:30am EDT

#DataOps: The Final Frontier?

A continuum of technology advances is providing the momentum and the desire to derive more value from data (visualization tools, cloud services, IoT, AI, and ML). DevOps/Agile focuses on delivering business value through rapid, high-quality software delivery; DataOps has a parallel need to deliver rapid business value by reducing the end-to-end cycle time of data analytics and data science. Math, analytics, and data science need to have the same rigors as software engineering, including change control, configuration management, and release management. But analytics practices often lack these rigors, and it is a problem! This talk is an introduction to the emerging principle of DataOps. Each topic covered includes real-world examples from my current clients, largely in the government sector including civilian and defense.

Speakers

Tracy Bannon

Senior Architect, Deloitte Consulting

I am a passionate architect with over 25 years' experience. As a senior architect with Deloitte's Cloud Engineering practice, I work across commercial, state, and federal government clients. My specialty is solution and application architecture emphasizing cloud-native/for-cloud refactoring... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 11:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, DevOps

1:00pm EDT

Post Hoc Systems Architecture: An Argument for Microservices First

Common advice about microservice architectures is to begin with a monolithic application and then break it into microservices, such as per Martin Fowler's observation of the difficulty of getting bounded contexts right from the outset. On the opposite side of the spectrum, others such as Stefan Tilkov argue for starting with a microservice architecture "to allow for fast, independent delivery of individual parts within a larger system." We go one step further than Tilkov by proposing that it can be a good investment to start with a microservice architecture when long-term requirements or obligations are unclear, in order to be able to later identify business-critical components to merge and refactor into small but highly maintainable monoliths while isolating low-priority technical debt in non-critical microservices that require little to no maintenance. This approach aims to expedite initial release as much as possible while also minimizing the long-term cost of strategic technical debt incurred along the way. We describe how this originally unintentional approach played out over two years for the information retrieval infrastructure of Watson Discovery Service and why we are now formalizing it.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Anastas Stoyanovsky

Senior Software Engineer, IBM Watson

Anastas works in artificial intelligence and information retrieval for IBM Watson, working in collaboration with IBM Research. He holds an MSc in pure mathematics from Purdue University and a BSc in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh... Read More →

Aiton Goldman

IBM Watson

Charles Gala

IBM Watson

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 →

saturn2019 post hoc systems architecture v2 pptx

Tuesday May 7, 2019 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Microservices

1:00pm EDT

The DRY Principle Is Misunderstood

The Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle has swept the world. It is often the first thing new engineers are taught. It has probably affected your current code base in a big way. However, despite your code being "DRY," your code is hard to change. Files have to be changed for seemingly unrelated reasons as shotgun surgery and code brittleness abound. You might ask yourself, “Why is this happening?”

In this talk, I will show you that the DRY Principle actually is about eliminating duplicate representations of “concepts” in their system. Duplicate code is often misidentified as part of this principle, and attempts to clean it up are made. The end result is lots of shotgun surgery (many places change for the same reason) or divergent change (one place changes for many). This yields tons of pain for the development team, and eventually a clamor for a complete rewrite of the system.

I will give you three techniques to highlight incorrectly DRY code. These are

focused conversations with the product team
asking yourself the question "can I reason about this separately?" before you remove duplication
how to notice shotgun surgery or divergent change

Once you know how to identify incorrectly DRY code, I will walk you through a code example where introducing a new path is very difficult. We will refactor the code so that the independent concepts are isolated. Once the code is fixed, I will show how easy it is to make the desired change—no extra conditions required.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Steven Solomon

Senior Software Engineer, Pivotal Labs

Steven Solomon is a Senior Engineer at Pivotal Labs. He has spent many years writing software on teams in many industries and languages. He is passionate about writing clean code and wants to share his experiences with you. If that doesn't work, he’ll play you some blues guitar... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Design Technique, Technical Debt

1:00pm EDT

Scaling Up Incremental Design Reviews

Motivated by the agile movement, we developed and applied an experimental incremental design review method about five years ago with an eye toward maturing it for widespread use. The initial trial run included two small projects over a six-month period. This talk describes our experiences as we scaled the method to see how it works in a realistic operational context. In a two-year period, we used the method for over 20 design reviews in the health-care domain with teams using diverse lifecycles, technologies, and experience levels and from several different companies. Attendees will hear firsthand experience applying incremental design reviews on these projects. They will leave the session with artifacts they can use themselves to integrate with agile and SAFe lifecycles (depending on project or enterprise scope). We will also describe how data from this method informed the Enterprise Technical Debt Discovery and Tracking Method (described in our other presentation).

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Felix Bachmann

Software Engineering Institute

Felix H. Bachmann is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) working in the Product Line Systems Program on both the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis and Product Line Practice Initiatives. There he is the team lead for architecture-centric... Read More →

Stephany Bellomo

Software Engineering Institute

Stephany Bellomo is a Principle Engineer at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Stephany’s current technical interests include technical debt, modernization, and DevOps. Stephany has a master's degree in software engineering. She began her career... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Design Technique

1:00pm EDT

Design Leadership

When we talk about design leadership, we mean it in both senses: distinctive design leadership in the market and leading design in the organization. In this tutorial, we explore what that means, how we develop design excellence and leadership in ourselves, and how we nurture it in our teams. We combine an introduction to key topics (with some exposure to related concepts, research, and theory) with some practice elements. We survey essential topics in system design and what it takes to be effective, and then delve into effectiveness areas, including strategic context understanding and shaping, organizational skills such as communication and influence, and how to be a more effective technical leader.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Ruth Malan

Bredemeyer Consulting

Ruth Malan began working on software architecture in the Software Technology Lab at HP Labs. She has been working as a senior architecture consultant at Bredemeyer Consulting for almost 20 years. She was the winner of the 2017 Linda M. Northrop Software Architecture Award for her... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Tutorial, Design Technique

1:45pm EDT

Modeling Microservices with DDD

Many have suggested using domain-driven design (DDD) to help define the functional scope of microservices. But how to apply this idea in practice is not clear to everyone. DDD is a domain modeling technique created in the early 2000s. Microservices is an architecture style that became popular in 2015 as means to break software solutions into a set of independently deployed services. In this talk we'll cover basic DDD concepts, and we'll discuss why and how DDD can help create microservices with better autonomy, scalability, and reliability. Using examples, we'll navigate from a domain model to the design of both synchronous (REST-based) and asynchronous (reactive) microservices.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)

Joseph Yoder

The Refactory

Joseph (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 serves as president of the board of The Hillside Group, a group dedicated to improving the quality of life of everyone who uses, builds, and encounters... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 1:45pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Microservices, Design Technique

3:00pm EDT

Distributed Tracing in Serverless Systems

As companies move from monolithic to multiservice architectures, existing techniques for debugging and profiling begin to break down. Previously, troubleshooting could be accomplished by isolating a single instance of the monolith and reproducing the problem. With microservices, this approach is no longer feasible because no single service provides a complete picture of the performance or correctness of the application as a whole.

Old approaches for distributed tracing include enforcing a policy across the development teams, such as writing manual traces inside the code. In serverless, cloud-based systems, new things can be achieved. Since some of the environment characteristics are known in advance, the tracing can sometimes be done automatically, which makes it far more powerful.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Shannon Hogue

Epsagon

Shannon Hogue is a software executive who has been building product for over 20 years and is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Epsagon. She has extensive experience in software engineering management and operations at top technology firms. She is currently focused on monitoring... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless

3:00pm EDT

A Plunge into Serverless with AWS Lambda and Node.js

In this talk, we will try to first have a short, but honest discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the Serverless paradigm, identify where to apply it, and identify where to pass. Then we'll develop a very simple Serverless application using AWS Lambda. We’ll discuss how to integrate our application with the rest of the AWS platform and what directions we can take to further expand it.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Yavor Papazov

CyResLab, European Software Institute

Yavor Papazov has more than five years’ experience as a trainer in information security and has been leading the Cyber Resilience Lab team since its inception for the last four years. He has helped organize multiple CTF competitions and has participated in just as many, including... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:00pm - 3:45pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless

3:00pm EDT

Software Architecture Boot Camp: Lightweight Architecture Evaluations Using the Fundamentals and Techniques of the ATAM

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. Many organizations are struggling with the results of 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? This Architecture Boot Camp session covers practical and proven architecture analysis and evaluation fundamentals that should be incorporated into any software architecture evaluation process. We will demonstrate these principles that identify risks early in the development lifecycle using fundamentals and techniques from the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), a tested process that has been used in many evaluations over the past 15 years.

Speakers

Phil Bianco

Software Engineering Institute

Phil Bianco is a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Software Engineering Institute (SEI). He holds an MS in Software Engineering from CMU and a BS with Honors in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, he provides direct... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Boot Camp, Evaluation

3:00pm EDT

Understanding Blockchains

A blockchain consists of three elements: a contract, an immutable data structure, and cryptography. A wide number of variants of these three elements exist, and they can be combined in a variety of fashions in order to achieve an immutable record with as much of the information encrypted as the designers wish. This tutorial touches on variants of the contract and aspects of cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs and quadratic span programs. It was previously given at ICSA 2018 and the 2017 International Conference on Software Security and Assurance.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Len Bass

Carnegie Mellon University

Len Bass is an award-winning author who has lectured widely around the world. His books on software architecture are standards. His book on DevOps is, in the words of an Amazon reviewer, "the first DevOps book that shows a realistic and achievable view of the full implementation of... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Tutorial, Blockchain

3:30pm EDT

Function Composition in a Serverless World

As serverless applications grow more complex, function composition, or the ability for functions to call each other, becomes important. The talk explores four available options for composing functions, along with a deep dive into workflows, using examples and live demos for each approach. The presenter compares them with regard to expressiveness, performance, and fault tolerance, as well as other concerns, such as the ease of doing upgrades and monitoring the overall application’s performance.

Topics include
• coordinating functions: Manage the execution of other functions by calling them directly
• event-driven composition: Uses functions emitting and reacting to events on message queue topics
• workflows: Introduce a mechanism for expressing a graph of function interactions and having a new runtime to manage the execution of these functions
• compiling functions: Merge functions into more complex functions by combining them on a source-code level

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Josh Hurt

Platform9

Joshua Hurt is a senior software engineer at Platform9. He graduated from the University of Texas, Austin, as a Terry Scholar with a BS in Computer Science. From his early days interning with UnboundID and with the Chief Technologist at NASA up to today, he enjoys experimenting with... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless

3:45pm EDT

GraphQL + Ruby = ❤

Are you a backend developer who has heard about this new technology called GraphQL? Do you feel a bit left out?

GraphQL is an expressive query language, released by Facebook in 2015, that allows for granular and network-efficient control over retrieved data with a single request, type-safe API definitions with the ability to easily evolve and extend them, and wide tooling support backed by some of the biggest companies, like Facebook, GitHub, Shopify, and more.

Let's look into the state of GraphQL in Ruby and see how we can benefit from the amazing power that GraphQL APIs can provide us. We'll look at how to integrate existing GraphQL APIs as data sources for our existing applications and show how it can improve the performance of our applications compared to equivalent REST APIs. We'll also take a deep-dive into a tool I wrote called “GQLi,” a GraphQL client that enables users to write queries in native Ruby code. I'll describe its philosophy, how to use it, and some cool meta-programming tricks used to create it.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

David Litvak Bruno

Contentful

Ruby and Python evangelist, agile devotee, frustrated sports legend, and currently a developer evangelist at Contentful, David Litvak Bruno spends most of his days coding and slaying orcs and beasts in his favorite RPGs. For the last 8 years, David has worked as a professional developer... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 3:45pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, New Technology

4:00pm EDT

Microservices: Scaling Down at the Edge

This talk will cover several topics relevant to mobile computing in disadvantaged environments, including disaster areas and the tactical edge. The focus will be on using a microservice-based architecture to best provide capability to users in these environments. We will start by exploring the specific challenges that disadvantaged environments pose to effective computing, which include network, computational, and power limitations.

Next, we will discuss the architectural approaches that address these challenges. We will start by suggesting what we consider to be the most important quality attributes that a software solution should support in order to best provide capability to the user, given the environmental limitations. This may include (but is not limited to) attributes such as survivability, resiliency, scalability, adaptability, security, and performance.

Finally, we will examine how a microservices approach can support the desired architectural quality attributes, drawing on our experience with various projects in this domain. Several approaches, technologies, and hardware platforms will be examined as exemplars, including a variety of microservice management and orchestration approaches.

Speakers

Marc Novakouski

Software Engineering Institute

Marc Novakouski is a Senior Engineer at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Novakouski has over 18 years of professional software development experience, spanning defense, commercial, and academic fields. He has expertise across a wide set of technical domains... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 4:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Microservices, Mobile

4:45pm EDT

Domain-Driven Design of Big Data Systems

Big data has become a very important driver for various industries such as health care. For successful design of big data architecture in the medical domain, I propose a domain-driven approach based on feature modeling. This model includes common and variant features of big data systems.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Babu Samuel

Siemens Healthineers

Babu Samuel has been working in IT for about 20 years. For the past 7 years, he has been working as an architect and a technical lead at Siemens Healthineers in Princeton, New Jersey.

Tuesday May 7, 2019 4:45pm - 5:00pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

DEV@SATURN, Big Data

5:00pm EDT

Fundamental IDEAS for Designing Modern Service-Based Systems

Yes, IDEAS is yet another silly mnemonic acronym: Interface segregation, Deployability, Event-driven, Availability over consistency, Single responsibility. But these are the core principles for microservice design, and in 15 minutes we'll relate them to the techniques, tools, and technologies we use today to develop modern, service-based, distributed systems.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Paulo Merson

Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU)

Joseph Yoder

The Refactory

Tuesday May 7, 2019 5:00pm - 5:15pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

DEV@SATURN, Microservices

5:15pm EDT

Developing IIoT System Using Microservices and Its Architectural Evaluation Using ATAM

Aselsan is developing new IoT infrastructure software using a microservices approach and edge computing practices. The development is being performed as a product line, so end products will be utilized for energy management systems, pipeline monitoring systems, and gas and water distribution systems. Edge devices are being developed using embedded Linux, and MQTT is used as the main backbone of edge services. The monitoring and control system of this product is being developed with favorite microservices technologies like Apache Storm, Rabbit MQ message queue, Redis, Elastic Search, and a Docker container. The first deployment of this product line was just deployed to Istanbul as Electric Distribution System Monitoring.

This presentation will describe the architecture development process of the product line together with an architectural analysis based on the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) of the product line architecture. Risks, sensitivity points, and tradeoffs identified during scenario-based analysis will be presented. The presentation will conclude with experiences gathered from the field for the first deployment of the system.

See the slides.

Watch the slides.

Speakers

Sercan ÇİDEM

Expert Engineer, Aselsan

Sercan Çıdem is a hands-on expert software engineer at Aselsan, Inc., with eight years of experience. He graduated from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, with a BS in Computer Science. He works on experimenting with the cutting edge of cloud technologies like Kubernetes... Read More →

Tuesday May 7, 2019 5:15pm - 5:30pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

DEV@SATURN, Product Line

6:00pm EDT

SATURN Celebration Reception

Join us on board the Gateway Clipper Fleet's Princess for the SATURN Celebration Reception and river cruise. Explore Pittsburgh's three rivers as you catch up with colleagues you already know and meet new ones.

The Princess will be docked for the first hour; then it will set sail around the Steel City for the second hour. Each guest will receive two drink tickets good for wine, beer, and spirits at the party. Non-alcoholic beverages are complimentary, and no tickets are needed for these. Once you’ve used your tickets, you may purchase additional alcoholic beverages.

Remember to bring your government-issued ID if you plan to enjoy adult beverages onboard. Bags are allowed, but all carry-on items are subject to inspection.

The Gateway Clipper Princess will be docked and sail in rain or shine. In the case of extreme inclement weather, determined by the U.S. Coast Guard, the reception will take place in the Sheraton's Reflections and Waterfront Rooms.

Tuesday May 7, 2019 6:00pm - 8:30pm EDT
Gateway Clipper Princess Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Reception

8:30am EDT

Morning Remarks

Wednesday May 8, 2019 8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session

9:00am EDT

Keynote: Breaking the Game: Analytics Revolutions in Baseball

It’s no secret that professional sports has been a hotbed for the application of analytics in changing age-old business practices and decision making. It has been 15 years since the publication of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. In this talk, we’ll explore both the pre- and post-Moneyball history of analytics revolutions in baseball right up to the present with the current ways in which the combination of data, software, and technology continues to “break the game.”

See the slides.
Watch the video.

Keynote Speakers

Dan Fox

Senior Director of Baseball Informatics, Pittsburgh Pirates

Dan Fox is the Senior Director of Baseball Informatics for the Pittsburgh Pirates and has been with the club since 2008. In this role, he and his team are responsible for the architecture, development, and dissemination of information systems and predictive analytics within the Baseball... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 9:00am - 10:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Keynote

10:30am EDT

Can Software Architecture Be Used to Support Innovation?

This presentation will discuss whether software architecture can be used as a tool to support innovation and make innovation mainstream within the enterprise, using three real-life case studies as follows:

Case Study 1: Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
• A brief introduction to AI and ML
• Why does architecture matter for AI and ML? It's (almost) all about the data. Data is the lifeblood of ML.
• Going forward: How will AI and ML impact architecture?
• Lessons learned

Case Study 2: Working with Virtual Assistants and Cognitive Agents
• A brief introduction to virtual assistants and cognitive agents
• Some examples of virtual assistant architectures
• Some examples of cognitive agent architectures
• Going forward: Single domain vs. multi-domain virtual assistants
• Lessons learned

Case Study 3: Working with Blockchain
• A very brief introduction to blockchain
• A solution in search of a problem?
• How does architecture matter for blockchain implementations?
• Going forward: Marrying blockchain and AI/ML
• Lessons learned

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Pierre Pureur

Travelers

Pierre Pureur currently leads the Travelers Innovation Center (TIC). The TIC focuses on introducing innovative approaches (such as AI/ML-based approaches and emerging technologies) to Travelers. Prior to his current role, Pierre was the Enterprise Chief Architect for Travelers. Prior... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, ML, Blockchain, Other

10:30am EDT

Enterprise Technical Debt Discovery and Tracking

In our role of providing technical guidance for a large health-care organization (over 50+ systems) over the past five years, we surfaced many technical problems that have accumulated effort and cost over time. In other words, we saw a lot of technical debt! We noticed that some types of technical debt have greater enterprise consequence than others. For example, we saw how duplicative authentication/access control capabilities actually increased security risk and complexity across the entire enterprise. We refer to technical problems such as these as “enterprise technical debt.” We also found that enterprise technical debt within the organization was usually not discovered until a crisis occurred. Therefore, over the past two years we introduced a method for discovering and tracking enterprise technical debt. In this session, I will share how our method works, examples of enterprise technical debt items, and pitfalls and lessons learned and explain how we used enterprise technical debt to inform the investment planning level of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) lifecycle.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Felix Bachmann

Software Engineering Institute

Stephany Bellomo

Software Engineering Institute

Wednesday May 8, 2019 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Technical Debt

10:30am EDT

An Architect's Framework for Navigating Complexity

We want our organizations and systems to be agile. We want them to evolve with the needs of the business, its customers, and its stakeholders and to be resilient in the face of ever-changing market conditions and the external environment. This level of adaptability and responsiveness needs to be supported by the architecture of the systems we create. The complexity of the environment that architects find themselves in is increasing in recent years, with cloud, DevOps, continuous deployment, microservices, and other elements adding to the factors that architects must consider. With this growing complexity, architects need to be supported by effective decision-making approaches.

Size is also a factor. Larger systems and larger organizations have, by definition, a larger number of dependencies (internal and external) that must be managed and a larger number of stakeholders (internal and external) whose needs must be addressed. The architecture of larger systems can involve hundreds or thousands of people, creating dozens to hundreds of products, components, and subsystems that all need to work together. Maintaining the conceptual integrity of the architecture under such circumstances, and over time, presents many challenges and a greater need for coherence.

To navigate all of this, agile architects need to be adaptive; they need the ability to dynamically shift their decision-making approach to match the complexity of the circumstances they face. This session will describe how lessons from complexity science—and in particular, sense making and the Cynefin framework—can help architects be more agile in how they work and, in turn, help them develop architectures that are more agile and adaptive to the needs of the organizations they serve.

Learning Outcomes
* Applying sense making in the context of architecture
* Applying the Cynefin framework to architecture problems and decisions
* Examples of architecture problems and decisions that can be mapped to the different domains represented by the Cynefin framework (obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disordered)
* How to manage the transition of architecture problems between these different domains
* Implications for organization structure and communications
* How such an approach leads to a more resilient architecture and a more antifragile organization
* How complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework supports emergent architecture
* How complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework help the organization and the architecture be more agile

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Ken Power

Software Engineering Leader, https://kenpower.dev/

Ken Power has held multiple positions in large technology organizations. His current responsibilities include leading global, large-scale engineering organization transformations. He has been working with agile and lean methods since 1999. He holds patents in virtualization and network... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Tutorial, Design Technique, Complexity

10:30am EDT

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 focus primarily 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.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Joseph Yoder

The Refactory

Wednesday May 8, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Tutorial, Agile Architecture

11:15am EDT

Blockchain Is the Answer—Redux

At my SATURN 2018 presentation, “Blockchain Is the Answer. What Was the Question Again?” I introduced the architecture quality attributes we use in Statoil (now Equinor) to evaluate blockchain projects and architectures. In this talk, I give an update on our attributes based on what we have learned since last year, as well as introduce new attributes on
* security
* privacy
* ecosystem
* development team
* testability
* private vs. public implementations
* integration
* and more

This talk is intended to help you navigate the blockchain hype and determine whether blockchains are a true benefit to your project and, if so, what to consider for a good, secure blockchain implementation.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Harald Wesenberg

Equinor

Harald Wesenberg is a long-term participant in the SATURN community. Previous talks at SATURN has been well received and even resulted in contributions to IEEE Software Magazine ("Making Architecture Matter," May/June 2012). Outside the SATURN community, he gives talks on a variety... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Blockchain

11:15am EDT

Technical Debt Management as Transparent Communication Hub

Technical debt is a burden and an opportunity at the same time. There are many different definitions, but what does technical debt really mean? It seemed to have something to do with the problems we were facing. We have many different large code bases grown over decades, with their difficulties and flaws. Is that all technical debt? How serious is it? How can the non-expert understand the implication of it?

This experience report describes our journey from having only diffuse information, gut feelings of developers about architectural problems, and many project surprises to a transparent way of managing our technical debt and being able to estimate and communicate the consequences of it.

We needed to define the term technical debt in our context and created a management process. We set up a ticket system to categorize, rate, and describe the debt and its implication. Introducing and following that process, we faced various challenges while initially exploring the debt we had already accumulated, understanding the effects on our projects, and finding solutions to decrease it.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Matthias Kittner

Software Architect, ESI Group

Matthias Kittner works at ESI Group, a global provider of virtual prototyping solutions, where he is leading software architect. In his role, he connects with teams across the globe, helping them create state-of-the-art software architecture and establish development processes including... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Technical Debt

1:00pm EDT

Microservices: Confidentiality Hates Decoupling

Despite the benefits of microservices, this architecture has introduced some security challenges. In my talk, I will focus on the confidentiality issues associated with this contemporary architecture. My point is that microservices architecture could introduce major insider threats to data confidentiality.

First, being authorized to call a web service does not necessarily grant the user the right to request the data of any resource. Users shall always use the web services for the best interest of businesses and customers. Imagine a hospital web application that uses the microservices architecture to implement the backend web services. One web service could be responsible for returning patients’ confidential data, such as full name, address, phone number, and picture. Such a web service is needed in several places of the application. As microservices are decoupled, it would be difficult for this web service to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate requests. As a result, a data breach could happen. Using coarse-grained web services, however, mitigates the impact of this threat. This is because each user will have access to a limited subset of the confidential data. Access to confidential data is controlled by the user’s permissions to each hospital software module.

In my talk, I will discuss this security issue, and I will propose some security countermeasures to prevent or mitigate its impact in the applications that use microservices architecture.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Jawad Damir

Jordan University of Science and Technology

Jawad Damir holds a Master of Information Systems Management from Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University (Class of 2011). He has worked as a software development engineer for highly prestigious companies such as Yahoo! Inc. in California and Verizon Data Services in Florida. Meanwhile... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Microservices, Security

1:00pm EDT

Visual Thinking: A Prerequisite for Democratic Design

The tangibility rule of design thinking tells us that the best way to share abstract ideas is to make them concrete. For software architects, this often means diagramming. As kids we had little trouble expressing our ideas visually, but we’ve noticed that lots of adults have trouble putting pen to paper (or marker to whiteboard) to draw a picture of what’s on their mind. At some point along our journeys to earn diplomas and advanced degrees, many of us lost the ability to think visually. Drawing complex ideas became difficult. This is a major problem for software architects since our job requires us to reason about and share complex ideas.

Visual thinking is a prerequisite for democratizing design. This means everyone needs the ability to think visually. Drawing pictures—the right kinds of pictures—and using those pictures to tell stories allow us to make the abstract more concrete, the complex seem simple. Think of it as a form of analytical literacy that is just as important for architects and developers to have as quality attribute scenarios or decision trade-off analysis. In any democracy, education is the key to success and literacy is the basis of education. If our goal is to decentralize design authority among a team, then the whole team must have the ability to think visually so they can spread the design ideas that enable decentralized decision making.

In this session, we will learn about the theory behind visual thinking and how it applies to software architecture design. We'll also gain firsthand experience through practice. All participants will leave the session with a workbook they may use to continue advancing their visual thinking skills.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Michael Keeling

Software Engineer, LendingHome

Michael Keeling is a software engineer at LendingHome and the author of Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect. Prior to LendingHome, he worked at IBM on the Watson Discovery Service. Keeling has a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →

Owen Keeling

Owen Keeling is a first grader at Linden Elementary School in Pittsburgh. His favorite subjects are Chinese, art, and music. Owen is currently learning to program using Scratch and Ruby so he can make his own video games. In his spare time, Owen enjoys reading, building with legos... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Documentation

1:00pm EDT

Continuous Design of IT Systems

I’ve been applying a mixture of agile, domain-driven design, functional programming, and architecture ideas to information technology (IT) systems. Most architectural case studies report on one round of design, but my projects were being designed and redesigned continuously. This talk covers some insights I’ve had and some ways of working that may help you on your projects.

Agile and architecture differ in their use of control systems (open loop, closed loop) to guide projects. We can mix them, but only when the team agrees to the mixture; e.g., agilists don’t shout YAGNI and architects don’t stop the presses. We should use open loop control for some things and closed loop for others.
The team won’t have a single architect but neither will it have silos of expertise. Instead, the team creates and evolves a shared understanding of the architecture that is represented in the code base (including types, framework components, comments, and READMEs).
The team maintains intellectual control of the system. It keeps the state space small and sufficiently well understood to reason about it and derive conclusions. The design is continuously changing, so team members evolve the code to match that understanding and actively communicate relevant changes to the rest of the team.
Humans are not ideal computing machines and work better with some external representations (i.e., source code) than others. To facilitate human reasoning, teams should mercilessly refactor their code so that it matches their internal theories of the requirements and the design. Without aggressive refactoring, complexity quickly accumulates, preventing axiomatic reasoning and intellectual control. Theory building is refactoring.
We should expect the code tied to the domain to converge as the team masters the requirements. The architectural infrastructure may never converge. As the team’s theories become clearer, the source code (in the small) will take on a functional, definitional flavor regardless of programming language.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

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 8, 2019 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Invited Speaker

1:00pm EDT

Speaker Office Hours

Office-hours sessions are conducted by some of our conference speakers. The sessions give attendees a chance to meet with these experts directly and explore their ideas in greater depth.

Schedule for this session will be added soon.

Wednesday May 8, 2019 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Office Hours, Other

1:30pm EDT

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Bridging the Gap Between Dev and Ops

Getting quality software into production quickly and efficiently is a major priority for organizations of all types. Yet many find that development teams’ focus on innovation and experimentation conflicts with Ops’ mandate to mitigate risk and increase predictability. This cultural and organizational mismatch puts transformation success at risk and generates a constant state of release anxiety. However, breaking down these silos and implementing new trends in organizational structures, value stream mapping, and pipeline monitoring and tracking can help get development and operations speaking the same language.

In this session, we share top lessons learned from large organizations and concrete tips for bridging the gap between Dev and Ops. Learn how you can increase delivery velocity, while also improving quality, security, and auditability at large-scale organizations.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Anders Wallgren

Electric Cloud

Anders Wallgren is chief technology officer at Electric Cloud. Anders has over 25 years’ experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse and management positions at Macromedia... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, DevOps, Production, Continuous Delivery

1:30pm EDT

Creating, Reviewing, and Succeeding with Architecture Decision Records

Some of the decisions that architects make are more consequential and higher impact than others and need to be preserved. This workshop session

* shares the motivation that led to trying Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for preserving decisions
* shares experiences working with ADRs
* draws from experiences with multiple large-scale, global organizations and system architectures
* builds on established work with ADRs from other authors and practitioners
* presents a summary of experiences using ADRs with teams from three specific product lines
* shows examples of ADRs from each product line
* shares examples of challenges encountered when adopting and using ADRs
* provides participants with hands-on practice creating and reviewing ADRs

My experience of ADRs is with
* global teams in North America, Europe, and India
* architectures for large systems and code bases (multimillion LOC)
* large, complex, software-intensive systems that include software, hardware, and firmware design
* organizations dealing with architectures for multiple products and systems

## Learning Outcomes
* Get options for structuring and tailoring ADR templates, including some examples of how we have tailored ADRs with different teams
* Understand the types of decisions for which ADRs are appropriate and what decisions might be better suited to a different medium
* Learn factors to consider for creating, storing, and reviewing ADRs
* Foster a culture of valuing ADRs
* Learn factors to consider when working with distributed teams in multiple geographies
* Get pointers to other work in the area of ADRs

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Ken Power

Software Engineering Leader, https://kenpower.dev/

Wednesday May 8, 2019 1:30pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Documentation

2:00pm EDT

Legacy to Cloud-Native Modernization in GCP

The talk will describe the methodology of legacy software modernization into the cloud-native form as a better alternative to the frequently used lift-and-shift approach. The methodology was developed by the software development and consulting company SoftServe, Inc., to help its customers enable new business models, find new ways to innovate, and improve the cost efficiency of their systems by moving to public cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and others. The methodology builds on architectural concepts borrowed from the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method and Attribute-Driven Design methodologies in combination with 15 cloud-native factors, CI/CD, other DevOps practices, and patterns, such as Strangler, popular in modernization scenarios.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Andriy Shapochka

SoftServe, Inc.

Andriy Shapochka works as a Distinguished Architect and Strategic Consulting Group leader at SoftServe, Inc., a software development and consulting company. His experience as a software engineer, architect, and consultant totals to more than 20 years. Andriy holds multiple certifications... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Legacy, Cloud

3:00pm EDT

Modernizing Legacy Systems to Virtual, Cloud-Based, Software-Defined Infrastructures

Enterprises assimilate, process, transform, and potentially disseminate all kinds of information to achieve business objectives. Such endeavors usually come from side-offshoot initiatives that become part of the core business. The amalgamation of these offshoot initiatives into the core business and growing the software systems usually results in a nice Italian buffet riding on top of minestrone soup. Modernization (legacy transformation) is a must and in most cases ends up as a death march.

We worked on one such large network information storage system, successfully modernizing it into a software-defined infrastructure using a Cisco UCS platform. Where the legacy system encountered at least one business discontinuity per day, since modernization four years ago, it has had only one major outage due to human error.

We will present our experience in helping transform the legacy system into a modern modular system using several approaches, primarily the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) and ISO/IEC/IEEE 42030. We hope to provide insight into this complex endeavor at a high level as well as some appreciation of how the ATAM and architecture evaluation can be used to direct the modernization of legacy systems.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Rajesh Murthy

Rajesh Murthy loves obscurity. He started working on systems when the keyboards were larger than his body frame, with do LOOPS and monitors like green lanterns. Now his body frame is larger than the keyboards, and monitors are more colorful, but he is still managing LOOPS. He is currently... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:00pm - 3:45pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Legacy, Cloud

3:00pm EDT

Advanced Serverless Applications at The New York Times

When The New York Times decided to sunset its data centers and become 100% cloud based, it required rethinking how applications were designed, built, and hosted. Starting with the Crosswords platform and sweeping across the company, cloud functions and platforms like Google AppEngine have quickly become preferred tools among developers. This talk will dive into the journey toward serverless computing, the applications and patterns in production today, the issues faced and overcome, and work done to advance the state of the art of serverless tools and architectures.

Topics to be addressed:
- Overcoming the serverless hypebeast and getting engineers to take it seriously
- The serverless spectrum and where different problems fall on it
- How to manage secrets and security in a "stateless" environment
- What "stateless" really means and when it applies
- Pricy mistakes and cost controls

The Times employs an RFC process for any reasonably sized new systems or any new technologies a team desires to use within the company. RFCs are distributed to the entire technical organization and reviewed by our Architecture Review Board (which I sit on). The ARB is made up of senior engineers from a wide selection of teams. The ARB often also guides the writing of RFCs before they're made public to the rest of the company. The ARB ultimately provides feedback on the proposals with a focus on business value and best practices.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Darren McCleary

Senior Software Engineer, The New York Times

Darren McCleary is a senior software engineer at The New York Times, where he works on the Games Team and serves as a member of the Times Architectural Review Board.

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:00pm - 3:45pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless

3:00pm EDT

Speaker Office Hours

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Office Hours

3:00pm EDT

Agile Architecture Maturity Tutorial

Combining agile with architecture practices requires careful thought. At CGI, we have developed a maturity model for agile architecture, based on our ample experience tuning the architecture way of working to the agility required in different contexts.

The Agile Architecture Maturity Framework measures the architecture function’s maturity in an organization by looking at 11 key behaviors in four categories: understanding context, architectural decision making, validation, and fulfillment. The value of the architectural contribution depends on the proficiency and habits of those involved. Using this model, the maturity of the architecture function in an agile or traditional context can be measured by observing evidence and counter-evidence in daily practices. The knowledge gathered by applying the model is used to identify the most beneficial areas of improvement and to establish baselines and measure progress in improvement programs.

In this tutorial, we will take an in-depth look at the 11 behaviors that are good indicators of agile architecture maturity. Participants will assess their own organization's maturity level by scoring themselves, after which we will briefly compare notes and see if we can identify patterns. Attendants learn how to identify the most effective improvements in their team's way of working.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Eltjo Poort

Solution Architect, CGI

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:00pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Tutorial, Agile Architecture

3:45pm EDT

Re-engineering an Existing App to Be Cloud Agnostic

At Bosch, we have developed a solution that allows brick-and-mortar retailers to gain insights about customer journeys throughout their stores. The system uses IP cameras to capture anonymized metadata about customer movements, then transmits it to the cloud for analysis and visualization. Our agile team has taken a "pragmatic microservices" approach to gradually migrate the original organically grown monolith into a decoupled event-driven architecture. In our solution, each retailer is a single tenant, receiving its own set of cloud resources. Currently each system is deployed to Amazon Web Services, where messaging-, data-, and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings are used.

Recently, it was decided to have the ability to deploy the application to other clouds, with Azure as the first step. To achieve this, we found that we had to rely as little as possible on vendor-specific offerings, develop API-agnostic data access layers, and manually adapt our infrastructure automation code. Ultimately we may need a fully containerized architecture to achieve portability, maintainability, operatability, and consistent performance among all deployments. However, in the short term it was necessary to take this intermediate "manual port" step in order to meet deadlines and learn as a team how to make the application's messaging and data access layers cloud agnostic.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Ying Liu

Bosch Building Technologies

Ying Liu is a software engineer for In-Store Analytics Team at Bosch Building Technologies (BT). There she works as a full stack engineer and devops to provide retailers meaningful insights into the customer traffic of the store. Ying received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering... Read More →

Adam Wynne

Bosch Security and Safety of Things (SAST)

Adam Wynne is software engineering manager for smart camera application development at Bosch Security and Safety of Things (SAST). He currently leads a team building apps for a wide range of domains that will run on a new AOSP-based platform. Previously, he worked on various IoT projects... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:45pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Cloud, Legacy

3:45pm EDT

Serverless Integrations on Kubernetes/OpenShift

Apache Camel K is lightweight cloud integration platform based on Apache Camel. The “K” is a reference to Kubernetes but also to Knative. Knative provides tools to support development and CI/CD toolchains, but most interestingly it provides the capability for serverless (scale-to-zero) workloads. This presentation provides a blueprint on how to build cloud-native serverless applications on Kubernetes in general, using Camel K as a reference implementation.

The easiest way to create a Camel K runtime integration application is to use the Syndesis/Fuse Online design time. Syndesis is a cloud-native open source IPaaS that lets users build integrations using a GUI. Syndesis includes AtlasMap for data transformation between components. Under the hood, the deploy step creates a container with a Camel K-based integration application and deploys it to OpenShift/Kubernetes. I will discuss the Syndesis architecture and how it interacts with the Camel K integration runtime.

The presentation includes a demo of Camel K runtime to update a simple integration and a demo of Syndesis/Fuse Online design time.

Key takeaways:

- You will learn how to define and use Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD).
- You will learn about Custom Controllers called Operators, a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application.
- Brief introduction to Istio Open Source Service Mesh leveraged by Knative
- Introduction to Knative: Provides support for Build, Serving, and Events; lets developers focus on writing code; and allows applications to be scaled to zero.
- Introduction to the Camel K runtime, Syndesis/Fuse Online IPaaS
- Discussion about initial response time when scaled-to-zero

Prerequisites:
Some basic knowledge of Kubernetes and Containers

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Kurt Stam

Red Hat

Kurt Stam has been working in the enterprise integration space for two decades. He is a principal middleware developer at Red Hat, where he worked on JBossESB, SOA Governance, and the Fabric8 framework to create cloud-native applications and microservices. Currently he is working... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 3:45pm - 4:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless

4:45pm EDT

Smart Decisions: An Architecture Design Game for IoT Solutions

During this session, we will introduce and play Smart Decisions for IoT, a game that simulates the architecture design process of a solution in the Internet of Things domain. The game is inspired by Attribute-Driven Design (ADD) and previous versions of Smart Decisions in the big data and machine learning domains. Players can learn about this approach to architecture design while they get more familiar with architectural considerations for IoT system design.

The game can be played individually or in groups of architects, and the players or teams compete against each other in a simulated architecture design activity for a system of networked Things. In each iteration, the players must solve a challenge associated with an iteration goal and a set of architectural drivers including quality attributes and constraints. Solving this challenge requires making design decisions which, in the game, are the selection of design concepts such as physical protocols or network topologies.

Prerequisites: You will need your smartphone (or tablet / laptop as an alternative) to take an active part in the IoT game and have a chance to win a prize.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Yaroslav Pidstryhach

IoT Practice Lead, SoftServe, Inc.

Yaroslav Pidstryhach is an IoT Practice Lead at SoftServe, a leading technology consulting and software services company. Yaroslav has been developing commercial software and leading projects since 2003, gaining experience in various areas such as multimedia applications, networking... Read More →

Serge Haziyev

SVP of Advanced Technology, SoftServe, Inc.

Serge Haziyev works as an SVP of Advanced Technology at SoftServe, a leading technology consulting and software services company. Serge has more than 20 years of experience in various technology domains, including big data, AI, IoT, and cloud computing. He is a co-author of Smart... Read More →

Rick Kazman

Professor / Research Scientist, University of Hawaii / Software Engineering Institute

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 →

Shaun Greene

Senior IoT Solutions Architect, SoftServe, Inc.

Shaun Greene is a Senior IoT Solutions Architect with SoftServe, a leading technology consulting and software services company. Shaun has 10 years of experience in electronics design and software development across many industries and applications from 8-bit wireless medical devices... Read More →

Wednesday May 8, 2019 4:45pm - 6:15pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session, Design Technique, IoT

8:30am EDT

Morning Remarks

Thursday May 9, 2019 8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session

9:00am EDT

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 9, 2019 9:00am - 9:30am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session

9:30am EDT

Linda Northrop Software Architecture Award Presentation

The Software Curriculum team of Siemens Healthineers has been selected for the Linda M. Northrop Software Architecture Award. The award is given to an individual or team that has used software architecture to significantly improve practices, outcomes, or both in an organization or in the software-development community.

The software curriculum began at Siemens in 2006 and focused on the critical role of the software architect of mission-critical, large complex systems. A main focus was on the central role the architect plays in business strategy, requirements, quality, and leadership. At Siemens Healthineers, the curriculum is well anchored in the people-development processes as part of a technical career path and aligned with related training programs. The members of the team have also taken the time to share their experiences with the larger software engineering community. Their leadership raised the awareness of the software architect’s role and challenged the software engineering community to adopt software architecture practices.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Frances Paulisch

Siemens Healthineers

Dr. Frances Paulisch is responsible for the company-wide “Software Initiative” based in the “Development Center” of Siemens Healthineers. A main focus of her work is empowering cross-functional teams to work together well over the whole development lifecycle to achieve speed... Read More →

Jürgen Vaupel

Siemens Healthineers

Jürgen Vaupel drove the implementation of the Software Curriculum at Siemens Healthineers from its beginning. He focused on ensuring that software architects receive clear distinguished recognition in the organization and have a clear career option as part of the Healthineers HR... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 9:30am - 10:00am EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Award Speaker

10:30am EDT

Monitoring and Supporting Microservices

If microservices are not architected correctly, they will be difficult to maintain and support. Great support starts with great architecture and ensuring the necessary tools are in place. I will focus first on domain-driven design. It is important to define domains properly; otherwise, ownership for a domain becomes an issue. Unless domains are designed to be independent, production releases will be difficult and require lot of coordination. I will walk through specific examples of how releases could be difficult if dependencies are not taken care of. DevOps practices like blue-green deployment, feature toggles, and microservice versioning are critical to successful deployment. These practices reduce deployment downtime and help releases go smoothly. In turn, they improve the supportability of microservices. The circuit breaker pattern and timeout settings are important in the microservices world as they localize faults and reduce customer impact. I will talk through an example. As we build and deploy microservices, how do we ensure that the end-to-end business process is auditable and traceable? I will share my experience on how we built traceability. Finally, how do we choose the right set of monitoring tools and what capabilities do we need for microservices monitoring? If you have just started or are mid-way into the microservices journey, attending my talk will help you avoid lot of pitfalls and also make the developers’ lives easier!

See the slides.

Watch the slides.

Speakers

Nidhi Swamy

Capital One

Nidhi Swamy is a Software Engineer at Capital One where she is currently developing a microservice for credit scoring models using Scala and Akka. She loves working on and has a passion for infrastructure and seamless deployments specifically focused on scalable solutions for high... Read More →

Sairam Tadigadapa

Capital One

I have been working at Capital One as director of software engineering for the last eight years. In my session in 2017, I talked about lessons learned while building microservices. I consider this as a continuation of those learnings, but it is more focused on supporting and monitoring... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Microservices

10:30am EDT

Reactive for the Impatient

This talk presents a few of the major Java-based reactive frameworks and toolkits in the market today, such as RxJava, Spring Reactor, Akka, and Vert.x. It will start by going over the basic tenets of reactive systems and some examples of the problems that these systems aim to solve. It will discuss the two most commonly used Java frameworks for implementing reactive coding, RxJava and Spring Reactor, and will show some code samples. It will then bring the audience to the next level of “reactivity” by introducing two reactive frameworks, Akka and Vert.x, which are usually used for implementing reactive microservices. It will draw some comparisons between these two frameworks and cite some real-life examples of their usages.

The takeaways for the audience will be an understanding of the key differences between reactive programming versus reactive systems, and the strength and weaknesses of each of the surveyed frameworks.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Mary Grygleski

IBM

Mary is currently a Java Developer Advocate for IBM's Digital Business Group, specializing in Reactive Java systems. She has been riding the software tech waves since 1989, starting with Unix and C; then setting sail for Java, open source, and web in the new millennium; and now venturing... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Design Technique

10:30am EDT

Self-Driving Cars and AI: Transforming Our Cities and Our Lives

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical to reaching full autonomy in self-driving cars. I will present two autonomy systems and describe the use of machine learning in each of them as well as the software development process used to build them. I will summarize recent progress in commercializing these systems and make some observations about the potential impact of these systems in our daily lives. Some of the biggest remaining challenges include efficiently solving the long tail of unusual events on the road, scaling up from demos to commercially viable systems, and verifying the safety of these AI-based systems. I will finish with thoughts on addressing those issues.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Jeff Schneider

Research Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Jeff Schneider is a research professor in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science where his recent research is on machine learning for autonomous systems. He has over 20 years experience developing and applying machine learning algorithms in government, science... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Invited Speaker, ML

10:30am EDT

Speaker Office Hours

Thursday May 9, 2019 10:30am - 12:00pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Office Hours

11:15am EDT

Tangible Ecosystem Design: Architecting Digital Ecosystems for Disruptive Services

The epoch of the platform economy has arrived. Companies face the question of how to build up disruptive digital services with disruptive business models and establish a digital ecosystem. This is a challenge requiring a strong interplay of business and technical experts. There is a clear lack of methodological and documentation support to master the complexity of many cross-company relationships like flows of exchanged assets, data flows, money flows, or legal contracts. Reasoning, designing, and documenting the user experience and the architecture of such digital ecosystems needs an end-to-end perspective on the resulting digital ecosystem and a strongly integrated approach of user experience design and architecture design.

In this talk, we introduce the “Tangible Ecosystem Design” method, which we developed after experiencing the pain described above in several projects. Its main aspects are tangible modeling elements based on toy figures and toy vehicles and a strong guidance through certain canvases to build on. The talk reports on the experiences from supporting numerous industrial customers with the method in designing their digital services and discusses how the architect’s role broadens in the platform economy.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Matthias Naab

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering

Matthias Naab is a software architect at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern and heads the department for Architecture-Centric Engineering. He is responsible for the development of methods for software architecture and for the development... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 5 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Experience Report, Design Technique

11:15am EDT

You Build It, You Secure It: Higher Velocity and Better Security with DevSecOps

One of the challenges businesses face today is the mandate to be agile and release software faster while at the same time ensuring they’re not the next news headline for a major security breach. One of the biggest stories in recent cyber history was the Facebook hack. In September of 2018, Facebook saw the biggest security breach in its history and over 50 million individuals’ private data were compromised. You and I could have been hacked, and we didn’t have a choice.

If the goal of DevOps is continuous delivery, then the goal of DevSecOps is eliminating the possibility of pushing vulnerable or insecure software releases to production. It’s 30 times cheaper to fix a security defect in development compared to production, yet security is often treated as an afterthought and a bottleneck. It doesn’t have to be that way. DevSecOps practices build security and quality into the software delivery process by making everyone responsible for security at every stage of the delivery pipeline.

In this session, we share tips that allow developers and operators to increase delivery velocity and harden their pipelines by including security earlier in the delivery process.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Anders Wallgren

Electric Cloud

Thursday May 9, 2019 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, DevOps, Security

1:00pm EDT

Architecting to Support Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) is everywhere, and there is a lot of material that discusses many of the difficulties associated with creating an ML solution from a data science point of view. This work covers aspects related to obtaining data, selecting a particular algorithm, and training and testing the algorithms. There is, however, less information related to architecting the software system where this algorithm will be running once it is in production. In this talk, we want to address this topic, both from a theoretical and practical point of view. Our goal is to help software architects that need to design systems that support ML by identifying common architecture design considerations for various phases of data processing, training, and model serving.

We will cover the following topics:

1. Where does software architecture fit in systems that support ML?

2. A framework for gathering primary architectural decisions of systems that support ML. These decisions include aspects such as
* type of training of the model and model location
* time of training: offline vs. online
* time of prediction: batch vs. on demand
* location of prediction: cloud vs. device
* technological choices
* other considerations

3. Several case studies of systems developed at SoftServe that support ML using the previously discussed framework.

4. Synthesis: What needs to be considered when architecting ML systems?
* Lessons learned
* Design process considerations

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Humberto Cervantes

SATURN 2019 Technical Co-Chair, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa

Humberto Cervantes is a professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa in Mexico City. His primary research interest is software architecture and, more specifically, the development of methods and tools to aid in the design process. He is active in promoting the adoption... Read More →

Rick Kazman

Professor / Research Scientist, University of Hawaii / Software Engineering Institute

Iurii Milovanov

SoftServe, Inc.

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 →

Thursday May 9, 2019 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, ML, Design Technique

1:00pm EDT

Serverless Continuous Delivery with Azure DevOps

As technical lead or architect, you want to deliver features frequently. You do not worry about quickly deploying a bug fix for fearing a rollback. Unfortunately, getting started with CI/CD and DevOps can be daunting. There are a lot of tools and services to choose from. The landscape changes continuously, and it is easy to spend a lot of time on configuring and maintaining a toolchain. We want to tell you what is great about having Azure DevOps as our only tool for the entire delivery chain but also about the cheats and workarounds that we had to take.

We started a new development team in our midsize financial service organization (100 employees). We had a greenfield opportunity at a small firm living with a Microsoft and Windows legacy. We went all in on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Service, now rebranded Azure DevOps, and we develop serverless applications in Azure. We deploy with a few clicks: we'll show you a demo! Having a single tool saves us from integration hassle, and having it in the cloud removes responsibility but does come with downtime. Yet, overall Azure DevOps is a simple and cheap way for small teams to deliver quickly.

We have not only achieved full automation of builds and deploys for our new serverless apps, but also we have begun replicating our success to delivery of legacy applications. We take one app from dev and build on a single developer box to continuous integration upon git push. This approach enabled releasing changes in smaller batches to reduce risk. Learn from our experience to find your own strategy to gradually speed up your development process.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Thijmen de Gooijer

IT Architect, 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 →

Thursday May 9, 2019 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless, DevOps

1:00pm EDT

Speaker Office Hours

Thursday May 9, 2019 1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Admiral Room Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Office Hours

1:45pm EDT

Democratization of AI/ML: Machine Learning for the Masses

Size of the AI/ML global opportunity
a. It is believed that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will contribute $13 billion to the global economy by 2030.
b. The following six companies have collectedly invested over $7.7 billion in AI/ML research and development: Google ($3.9 billion), Amazon ($871 million), Apple ($786 million), Intel ($776 million), Microsoft ($690 million), and Uber ($680 million).

Deficit of trained data scientists’ vs. open opportunities
a. According to the August 2018 LinkedIn Workforce Report, there is a national shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills.
b. IBM predicts that by 2020, the number of jobs for all U.S. data professionals will increase by 364,000 openings to 2,720,000.

Development of tools to make it easier for non-data scientists to do AI/ML
a. Six of the most common ML use cases are as follows: Customer Lifetime Value Modeling, Churn Modeling, Dynamic Pricing, Customer Segmentation, Image Classification, and Recommendation Engines.
b. Talk about ML APIs, Keras, and AutoML as enablers of addressing the “turnkey ML” use cases

Introduction to Use Case: Autonomous Inspections of Aircraft
a. Market opportunity for infrastructure inspection is over $45.2 Billion, with predictive maintenance specifically growing 400% by 2022.
b. Similar solutions have seen the following results: 10x reduction in time spent in inspections, 20% to 30% reduction in maintenance costs, and 15% to 20% reduction in unplanned downtime.

Breakout of the Google tools used in the demo and what each one does
a. Pub/Sub
b. Cloud Storage
c. Machine Learning APIs/AutoML
d. App Engine
e. Google Street View API
f. Google Earth API

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Tracy Bannon

Senior Architect, Deloitte Consulting

Ryan Luckay

Deloitte Consulting, LLP

Ryan Luckay is a Specialist Senior in the Deloitte Consulting, LLP, Technology and Systems Integration service. Ryan works as a project manager and futurist for government clients. Ryan has co-authored over 15 intellectual property filings and several white papers on topics involving blockc... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 1:45pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 4 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, ML

1:45pm EDT

Quick Wins for Modernizing Legacy Applications with Serverless

Enterprises today are in the throes of modernizing their legacy applications in order to leverage modern technologies—such as cloud, containers, mobile, IoT, AI, and more—so that they can deliver software innovation faster.

Serverless functions offer an incredible opportunity for organizations to accelerate their cloud-native and digital transformation journey. Serverless provides a compelling pattern for modernizing legacy applications while simplifying operations, reducing infrastructure cost, and improving developer productivity and time to market.

Advances in open source technologies that allow organizations to run serverless applications reliably, not just on public clouds, but also on their own existing infrastructure, have greatly increased the adoption of serverless across large enterprises. This made serverless a viable technology for migrating brownfield, existing applications to the digital era, both on-premise and in the cloud.

In this talk, we will discuss key patterns and quick wins for modernizing legacy applications using serverless architectures and functions as a service (FaaS).

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Vamsi Chemitiganti

Platform9 Systems

Vamsi Chemitiganti is Chief Strategist at Platform9 Systems. Vamsi works with Platform9's Client CXOs and Architects to help them on key business transformation initiatives.In previous roles, Vamsi was the CTO for RiskCounts, a FinTech based in New York, NY. Before that, he spent... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 1:45pm - 2:30pm EDT
Grand Station 3 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Technical Talk, Serverless, Legacy

2:45pm EDT

Multi-workplace Biometrics Sign-on Using Serverless Architecture in the Cloud

The serverless architecture addresses user sign-on in production environments where multiple users rotate between multiple workstations. The solution uses face photo for identification and authentication to increase security, usability, and productivity, as well as availability and scalability.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Andrzej Knafel

Roche Diagnostics International Ltd.

Andrzej Knafel is Chief Software Architect at Roche Diagnostics International Ltd. in Switzerland. His experience includes leading international teams and multisite software development projects focusing on automation, connectivity, security, and data management in health-care applications... Read More →

Thursday May 9, 2019 2:45pm - 3:00pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

DEV@SATURN, Serverless

3:00pm EDT

Value-Driven Architecture Documentation

Still writing one big architecture document? Or given up on architecture docs altogether? This talk will help you create lean and effective architecture documentation, focusing various forms of architecture communications on their goals, rhythms, and audiences.

See the slides.

Watch the video.

Speakers

Eltjo Poort

Solution Architect, CGI

Thursday May 9, 2019 3:00pm - 3:15pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

DEV@SATURN, Documentation

3:15pm EDT

Panel of Experts: New Challenges for Software Architects

When SATURN launched in 2005, it was just eight years after Mary Shaw and David Garlan established the field of software architecture with their book Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline. Since that first SATURN conference, the field has grown tremendously, and the practices have matured.

We have five panelists with us today. We’ll do a little bit of looking back, but we’ll spend most of our time looking forward: What are the challenges of today and of the future? And can the lessons of the past help us address those challenges?

Watch the video.

Panel Moderators

Panel Session

4:00pm EDT

Conference Awards and Closing Remarks

Thursday May 9, 2019 4:00pm - 4:15pm EDT
Grand Station 1&2 Sheraton Pittsburgh Hotel at Station Square

Plenary Session