SpringOne 2009: Time-to-live

A friendly duck - though not made of plush like Adrians.Disclaimer: This entry has been written while listening to the talk. Please forgive me any typographical or grammatical errors resulting from this approach.

Adrian Colyer will concern himself in todays keynote with the question about how to shorten the time between feature request and feature rollout to production. Basically he will relate to the concepts of learn software development.

Adrian gives a number of real life examples about “how to burn the fat and then feed the muscle” and then proceeds to the principles of lean software development:

  • Eliminate waste (demos explained below).
  • Create knowledge (standards exist to be challenged and approved, predictable performance is driven by feedback, use the scientific method)
  • Build quality in
  • Defer commitment (basically: try an agile approach)
  • Deliver fast (rapid devlivery, high quality and low cost are fully compatible)
  • Respect people
  • Improve the system (focus on the entire value stream, deliver a complete product, measure up)

Adrian sees three areas of waste that dominate:

  1. Extra features: Develop just the 20% of features that provide 80% of the business value.
  2. Crossing boundaries.
  3. Churn.

Optimization areas he offers:

  1. Platform-as-a-service (e.g. Amazons S3, Google App Engine and others – basically the idea of outsourcing application hosting). Here he demonstrated how to deploy a Grrovlet within a minute to Google App Engine followed up by a Grails demo.
  2. Data-center-as-a-service (Amazon EC2). The ensuing demo showed how to deploy a cluster of SpringSource dm server instances by using the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) to Amazon EC2.
  3. Use-your-own-data-center-as-a-service (“ultra-modular computing” according to Forrester ;-), basically virtualized  local data centers). Again a demo followed showing the VMWare virtualization stack and CloudTools.
  4. Hybrids.

Adrian as usual was a very fun presenter (and he brought the duck again). He showed four demos with quite a number of distributed systems interacting and most of them went very well. Excellent presentation, great insights in what you can do in the cloud and great display of what Spring has to offer in that regard.

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