Daily

Hi there, If we want to discuss testing applications designed and created by AI wehave to understand why do we test applications created by developers? Don’t we trust developers? Don’t developers trust themselves? No. We do test our applicatios for several other reasons. Not because oftrust. I will discuss them soon. So even if we… Read More »Why do we test applications

Hi there, With the conversational programming and systems build entirely by AI wehave to think how to test those systems. Testing is a crucial part for developers to know if the system is doing theright thing. How we enforce AI to double check created systems? Should we trust AI? Ifso we don’t need testing. Maybe… Read More »How to test AI created systems

Hi there, I am getting closer and closer to finding what a microbe is. Recentlythanks to the Simon Wardley YouTube video about Wardley Maps I realisedthat the driver behind our Infrastructure from pets and cattle tomicrobes journey was: ease of building higher order systems. This is the reason why we moved infrastructure from servers and… Read More »Will conversational programming with AI produce microbes

Hi there, Can AI make developers obsolete? It can already write code so we actuallydon’t need developers. Right? Not exactly. Because programming is not only about code, but also about thedesign. And right now AI cannot discuss problems with business people andguide them and discover the solution. But this will change. Imagine having a proper… Read More »About conversational programming and AI

Hi there, Currently a lot of developers and architects cheer for the monolith and areagainst serverless (or microservices). Plus, now they use the Amazon PrimeVideo case to prove their point. That even the Amazon people cannot make aserverless app profitable and switched to a monolith. The problem is that they didn’t switch to a monolith.… Read More »Is this a monolith yet

Hi there, In the Amazon Prime Video article by Maricn Kolny, he said one thing thatwas quite interesting: “We experimented and took a bold decision: wedecided to rearchitect our infrastructure”. What is interesting here is that they have to be bold to make thatdecision. I don’t have the full picture, but it has a feeling… Read More »Decision to change the infrastructure should be an easy one driven by current architectural drivers

Hi there, There is [[no such thing as the final architecture]]. One thing that strikes me about this ongoing Amazon Prime Video discussionis that they made the mistake of using serverless to build their system,because they have now switched to a monolith (is it really a monolith?). There are few wrong assumptions here. Let me… Read More »Speedboats and cruise ships in the Amazon cloud

Hi there, I am a very visual person, I like to see things. This not only helps meremember different things but also allows me to [[collaborate and discussdifferent things with others]] And I like to use many [[different ways to convey knowledge on an image]]: icons colors descriptive texts key for the graphics And one… Read More »Why maps are better than graphs

This is great news for Poland. There is a new region available for storage on Azure. In Warsaw, Poland.The data will be stored in Poland. The name is Poland Central. Time for a little celebration. Paweł

Hi there. I wrote this email myself, personally In the near future we will see a lot of such statements because of all thatAI (Artificial Intelligence) generated content. AI can generate not only text but also images. And this is a feature thatbreaks a lot of KYC software. KYC means Know Your Customer and it… Read More »AI + Cryptocurrencies vs KYC

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