Breaking up the monolith with good, old fashioned, OO-think: Instead, Vanguard has begun a journey to break apart our monolithic legacy systems piece-by-piece by replacing them with microservices over time. With a microservices architecture, we remove the business logic and data logic from our applications and replace it with a set of re-usable modules of code that are built and deployed as independent entities. We then compliment this architecture by chunking out our user interfaces into modular purpose-built components.

From 451’s report on Google Next: Google believes that a hybrid architecture will persist in the coming years as enterprises continue to migrate workloads to various clouds. Its hybrid cloud architecture revolves around its virtual private cloud. Google VPC is an instantiation of GCP that can dedicate compute, storage and network resources to an enterprise. It is built upon Google's proprietary private global network designed for high reliability, low latency and hardened security.

Can we take that governance and work with the platform team to codify, to automate that which they were doing on a per application basis - that's, quiet frankly slowing down the delivery of the software - can we take that governance and can we have them work with the platform team to codfiy, to actually automate on a per application basis, have them expose that as a service on the platform -Cornelia Davis on governance and cloud-native, “Who Does What?

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

I started a new booklet project, the Cloud Native Cookbook. The premise is this: The premise of this book is to collect specific, tactical advice transitioning to a cloud-native organization. The reader is someone who "gets it" when it comes to agile, DevOps, cloud native, and All the Great Things. Their struggle is actually putting it all in place. Any given organization has all of it's own, unique advantages and disadvantages, so any "

In a report giving advice to mainframe folks looking to be more Agile, Gartner’s Dale Vecchio and Bill Swanton give some pretty good advice for anyone looking to change how they do software. Here’s some highlights from the report, entitled “Agile Development and Mainframe Legacy Systems - Something’s Got to Give” Chunking up changes: Application changes must be smaller. Automation across the life cycle is critical to being successful.

My colleague Richard has a nice post suggesting the new functions enterprise architects can play in a cloud-native organization. I like this one in particular, help make the change: Champion new team organization patterns. As an architect, you can bring developers and operations teams together. Recognize that functional silos slow down delivery. A DevOps-type approach really works. Architects are perfectly positioned to pioneer new team structures that increase velocity and customer attentiveness.

Earlier this month I did a webinar with Nick at 451. He does a great job summarizing all the digital hoopla going around and I finish up with, predictably, why and how Pivotal can help out there, along with a few customer examples. Check it out!

The San Francisco-headquartered business revealed it pulled in $187.7m last year, up 170 per cent from its $110.3m in revenue in 2015. Gross profits were just over $138m from $78m, and net losses decreased to a piddling $49.6m, down from $65.4m the year before. Another take from Barb Darrow, inc.: Mulesoft has raised $1.5 billion in venture funding from such backers as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad, and New Enterprise Associates.

From Snap’s S-1, via Ben: In a world where anyone can distribute products instantly and provide them for free, the best way to compete is by innovating to create the most engaging products. That’s because it’s difficult to use distribution or cost as a competitive advantage—new software is available to users immediately, and for free. We believe this means that our industry favors companies that innovate, because people will use their products.