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There are so many job titles for architect: technical domain solution application data integration cloud Recently I am highly focused on the New Space domain. Not only is itinteresting but also quite impressive. Especially with SpaceX and the lowerand lower cargo costs for bringing satellites into space. And Azure as well has some space tech.… Read More »Is the Space Architect the next big thing after a Cloud Architect?

Observability is a non-functional requirement (NFR) of an IT system.The main goals are: to know if the system works on production to know if the system works properly to know if and when the system will break The idea behind observability is that, if I know that my system will breaktomorrow, I can fix it… Read More »The most important thing about observability

Performance is one of the non-functional requirements (NFR) for IT systems.We tend to think that performance has to be very high. In general, yes. But not always. As it is a very important driver, thebottom line is that performance has to be good enough. In Poland we have the banking system Elixir that runs sessions… Read More »Good enough performance

Money. This is the biggest architectural driver in IT. It has 2 flavors: actual costs of different options (can be calculated easily) most other architectural drivers could be represented as money, this canbe quite difficult to calculate At the end of the day, you have to think about the money. Paweł

The Azure Monitor and Application Insights could cost you a fortune. Logs can easily take gigabytes of storage. So use your logs wisely. Pawel

An interesting friction between developers and architects when it comes tochoosing a technology. A new technology especially. Imagine you are a developer that comes to a new company and to a new team.The team and the company uses one type of database: SQL Server. Arelational database engine. This is the way they are doing things.… Read More »The value of the known, new technology

I was reading a book from Mr Marek Budzisz called “Strategic solitude ofPoland” (it is in Polish, so the translation is mine). It is about currentgeopolitics and how Poland fits into the picture between our allies andRussia. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that in both: geopolitics and ITprojects, there are a lot… Read More »The golden bridge

Azure Functions are the event-driven, serverless, Function as a Service(FaaS) offer from Microsoft on the Azure cloud. The three basic, most popular, hosting options for Azure Functions, havedifferent pricing models. Prices are for the UK South region on 2022-02-09. Consumption Per second usage and number of executions. Meters: Execution Time: this is actually both time… Read More »Azure Functions pricing for basic hosting options

Azure Functions are the event-driven, serverless, Function as a Service(FaaS) offer from Microsoft on the Azure cloud. There are few options for hosting Functions, each has its own features,limits and costs with different pricing models. Basic hosting options Consumption Default plan. Has auto-scale and charges for resources usage while running Premium Has the same scaling… Read More »Azure Functions hosting options

What are Azure Functions? Azure Functions are the event-driven, serverless, Function as a Service(FaaS) offer from Microsoft on the Azure cloud. Function as a Service means that we develop and deploy each functionindividually. It is a next step in splitting the big monolithic applicationinto microservices and then into functions. Into smaller pieces to get morecontrol… Read More »About Azure Functions

Yesterday I’ve mentioned that architect should design wrong solutions. This obviously has a broader context. The idea behind this statement isthat architecture should be understood by everybody. We should discuss and reason about WHY a design looks like that. Forexample why there is an async flow for a scenario. Or why a given serviceis upstream… Read More »About wrong solution designs

How to win in the IT architecture: Ask WHY too many timesAlways speak after everybody elseDesign wrong solutions on purpose Paweł

From the recent Microsoft Annual Report for 2022 we can learnthat cloud is the main revenue source for the company. This comes as no surprise as we see companies migrating to the cloud andmoving away from owning and managing their own data centers. From the report:Revenue, classified by significant product and service offerings, was asfollows:(in… Read More »Microsoft invests in the cloud

Sometimes I hear the argument that we need to do microservices for customerexperience. As the more traditional monolith approach (a modular monolith)is seen as slow and clumsy. But this is not the case. The main reason we have microservices is forindependentdeployments. The monolith vs microservice change should have zero impact on yourcustomers. It is not… Read More »The microservice architecture is for developers

When designing architecture and creating documentation, an architect needsicons. Icons about infrastructure, services, networking, security, storage,etc. And specific to a given technology. Ideally from the vendor itself. Microsoft provides a set of icons for Azure and recently (January 2023)they’ve added new icons. You can find them all here: Azure architecture icons. There are 506 icons.… Read More »Azure architecture icons

Microsoft enables everybody to use OpenAI services on Azure. Currently those are: GPT3.5, Codex and DALEE2 with the ChatGPT coming soon. Looking at prices, the base options are the same using OpenAI directly or by using Azure. For the fine-tuned models there is also a cost of hosting and training (training is charged by hours… Read More »Azure OpenAI service pricing

My little experiment with writing a book with the help of AI wassuccessful. Today I received my book. Awesome feeling 😎 And the print quality from Amazon KDP is really nice. This makes me think about an idea I had last year, how to connect an NFT(Non-Fungible Token) with a physical book. I was thinking… Read More »Books and NFT

I did a little experiment. I wanted to see how difficult it would be to write a book (and publish it) with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). There are tons of AI tools available online in the beginning of 2023. Basically I needed two things: writing a book (text) and illustrating it (images). For… Read More »Writing book using AI

As Ben Kehoesaid: Serverless is a way to focus on business value. Think about it. With serverless, you shift focus from code, technology,infrastructure to delivering value to your customer base. Yes, they are important. But they are just an input for the final product,your business value. And serverless gives you the possibility to start from… Read More »Focus on the business value

Azure has a nice website with all the services that it offers. You can findit here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/?cdn=disable. I’ve created a visual map of all of them. And as of today (2023-01-13)there are 211 services in 21 categories. There are a lot of services. Some services might have more than one category. The map is located… Read More »All Azure cloud services – map

Every cloud provider has a lot of different services. Like storage, virtualmachines, containers, security, identity or compute. For Azure you can find all of them here:https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ Grouped by category, with search option and links to details. Keep in mindthat some services are in multiple categories. Azure ContainerInstances service is in both: Compute and Containers. Please… Read More »All Azure cloud services

By serverless we understand a hosting option for our software that does notrequire us to maintain our own servers. And that is the biggest value of serverless. Because if you have your ownservers you have to pay for them and maintain them daily (which also costs). On the other hand, with serverless you have less… Read More »The value of serverless

Imagine two kids: Alice and Bob. They both get a present from their parents: a balloon. Alice gets a red one. Bob gets a blue one. Parents notice that both children are sad. P: Alice, why are you sad? A: I don’t like red colors P: Bob, why are you sad? B: I want the… Read More »A tale about the value

2023-01-01 New Year 🥳 I wish you all the best 😀 This year I will start few new things. Launch few projects and products. Let’s make this new year: the year of value 💎 Paweł

ADR or Architecture Decision Record is a log entry about the decision you are making. Why do this? Because everything changes and you will have to change some decisions. And if you don’t know or remember the reasoning behind the initial decision it is difficult to change it with confidence. And if you change a… Read More »Architecture Decision Record ADR: the change

Do you have architecture if you don’t have an architect in your company? Yes, you have. Architecture is how you build the company and your systems. All thedecisions you make. So if you don’t have an architect, make sure you are documenting thosedecisions. With the context around them, different options you’veconsidered constraints, and assumptions. You… Read More »Architecture without architect

The new publicly available chat based on the OpenAI GPT language model is areal deal breaker. But not how everybody thinks about it. Yes, it will replace some jobs, willmake some jobs easier and open a lot of new cool possibilities. But the real competitor that should be afraid right now is GoogleSearch engine. Playing… Read More »The OpenAI ChatGPT is the new Google Search

Every CTO that I’ve worked with wanted one thing: visibility. For costs, technology, road maps, progress, you name it. But at the same time companies struggled to deliver that. The overall visibility for, you know, everything. It works both ways though. The business wants to know dev progress. But devs also want to know strategy.… Read More »CTO hide and seek