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SE Radio 653: Asanka Abeysinghe on Cell-Based Architecture
Asanka Abeysinghe, CTO at WSO2, joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss cell-based architecture -- a style that's intended to combine application, deployment, and team architecture to help organizations respond quickly to changes in the business environment, customer requirements, or enterprise strategy. Cell-based architecture is aimed at creating scalable, modular, composable systems with effective governance mechanisms. The conversation starts by introducing the context and some vocabulary before exploring details about the main elements of the architecture and how they fit together. Finally, Asanka offers some advice on how to implement a cell-based architecture in practice. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. Related Episodes SE Radio 396: Barry O'Reilly on Antifragile Architecture SE Radio 331: Kevin Goldsmith on Architecture and Organizational Design SE Radio 263: Camille Fournier on Real-World Distributed Systems SE Radio 236: Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture SE Radio 213: James Lewis on Microservices SE Radio 210: Stefan Tilkov on Architecture and Micro Services SE Radio 203: Leslie Lamport on Distributed Systems
Asanka Abeysinghe, CTO at WSO2, joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss cell-based architecture — a style that’s intended to combine application, deployment, and team architecture to help organizations respond quickly to changes in the business environment, customer requirements, or enterprise strategy. Cell-based architecture is aimed at creating scalable, modular, composable systems with effective governance mechanisms. The conversation starts by introducing the context and some vocabulary before exploring details about the main elements of the architecture and how they fit together. Finally, Asanka offers some advice on how to implement a cell-based architecture in practice.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Show Notes
Related Episodes
- SE Radio 396: Barry O’Reilly on Antifragile Architecture
- SE Radio 331: Kevin Goldsmith on Architecture and Organizational Design
- SE Radio 263: Camille Fournier on Real-World Distributed Systems
- SE Radio 236: Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture
- SE Radio 213: James Lewis on Microservices
- SE Radio 210: Stefan Tilkov on Architecture and Micro Services
- SE Radio 203: Leslie Lamport on Distributed Systems
Articles, and Resources
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Giovani Asproni 00:00:18 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host Giovani Asproni and today I will be discussing Cell-based Architecture with Asanka Abeysinghe. Asanka is the CTO at WSO2, a global infrastructure software company and he has over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing highly scalable distributed systems, service-oriented and microservice architectures. He’s a committer at the Apache Software Foundation and the regular speaker at numerous global events and tech meetups. Asanka is the creator and original author of Cell-Based Architecture, Digital Double, and the Platformless Manifesto. Asanka, welcome to Software Engineering Radio. Is there anything I missed that you’d like to add?
Asanka Abeysinghe 00:00:59 No I think. Thank you very much and it’s a pleasure to be here. I watched your previous episodes a very interesting podcast. It’s an honor to be here. I think you, gave a really good introduction. In addition to that, I have been in the industry for nearly two decades now, work on these large distributed systems and helping many organizations to be successful in their digital journey by implementing application architecture and application development in their different type of business objectives.
Giovani Asproni 00:01:33 So let’s start with, giving our audience some context. What is a cell-based architecture?
Asanka Abeysinghe 00:01:40 Yeah, so cell-based architecture is an architecture style and it’s a combination of application, deployment, and team architecture as well because sometimes people just take it as a deployment architecture. That’s why I specifically mentioned that it’s a combination of these three things. And during the podcast I will explain in detail about how it aligns with these three elements of application deployment and team architecture. So in a very high level that’s what it is and addressing most of the challenges the architects, developers, and DevOps and platform engineers facing today. I can give a little bit history about how we started as well and a little bit on why we started and then we can get into the concepts of the architecture style because having some understanding about how this idea came into the picture and then why we implemented might be really helpful for you to understand.
Giovani Asproni 00:02:48 Okay. So maybe then we can start with, what problems aims are you solving?
Asanka Abeysinghe 00:02:54 Yes. It’s basically this concept or the idea came to our thinking around 2017, 2018 when microservices came into the picture and people were blindly getting into microservices and implementing systems using microservice architecture. And if you can remember those days, there was a very famous diagram called Death Star diagram that represent thousands of microservices connecting to each other. You can’t understand how these things are connected, what are the dependencies so on and so forth. So that’s what we saw in the diagram, but it was more difficult inside those organizations who implemented these systems that they didn’t know who owned these microservices, who’s going to maintain it, what’s the lifecycle of a microservice? So it became a problem in the industry. So that’s how the idea came into the picture. And then we were trying to find a solution for that particular problem. So that was the primary issue.
Asanka Abeysinghe 00:04:08 And then that’s another thing that we identified that’s a gap between architecture, development and deployment. If I explain it in detail, architect something, he or she will draw some diagrams and then identify this should be the architecture that the system that they’re building. Then developer look at it and then they build something by referring the architecture more, aligned with that, but not exactly what the architect architected in the drawing board so diagrams. And then it get worse when the developer develop that thing and then give it to the deployment or DevOps and operational people, they deploy something completely different because they have to have some standards and then they need to look at the security. They need to look at what are the best practices they follow. So basically there wasn’t a connection in between the architecture, development and deployment. So we were looking at how we can address that by creating an architecture construct that you can take from architecture to development to deployment.
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