On 29 September LeanIX hosted the 2nd EA Connect Day at the Axel Springer Penthouse in Berlin. IT Managers, EAM and DevOps Experts from more than 30 companies came together to listen to topical presentations and network. Learning from each other was the prime objective. At the stunning location participants did not only have a fantastic view over Berlin but were also be inspired by the creative atmosphere of the rooms. The motto of the day was Modern IT Architectures. The speakers approached this theme from different vantage points: Large Corporates as well as dynamic e-commerce companies, analysts and young start-ups all offered an exiting mix of different perspectives on the subject. All had in common that a suituable IT architecture was considered to be central to the implementation of their business model.
Bimodal IT – The IT of two different speeds
Host
Axel Springer started off the presentations. Aneta Nowobilska and Andreas Joebges described animatedly which architecture model was suitable for organisations that want to develop digital products flexibly and successfully in spite of a historically grown IT landscape. Furthermore the significance of the role of the architect and architecture management in an agile development environment was examined. At Axel Springer Enterprise Architects emphasise business and application architecture in projects and also approve projects from an architecture point of view before they are authorised.
Cloud Architecture Excellence – new strategies and tools for IT and application landscapes of tomorrow
Carlo Velten of
Crisp Research presented current cloud trends and examined how organisations deal with hybrid IT worlds and how cloud architecture can be planned flexibly and sustainably. Demands on the next generation of IT management tools were discussed: In the future tools will be cloud-based to enable fast collaboration and timeliness of data. Integration with other tools and APIs will be absolutely necessary to provide EAM facts as well as being able to read and use Ops data. In the future EAM tools will merge with operative tools. Good visualisation will be crucial for the understanding and scope for design and finally tools have to be flexible and easy to use to ensure wide use in the organisation by all employees.
No end to scaling – an architecture for 3 billion daily requests
adjust processes more than 3 billion server requests every day. They are processed by the Berlin team with the help of a self-developed high performance platform. Paul Müller, CTO of adjust, explained the most significant aspects of the architecture in his presentation as well as the most important design decisions. adjust focuses fully on maximum performance by renting servers in data processing centres in the „classic“ way and optimizes the software stack from the bottom up.
DevOps meets EA – from deployment automatically into the EA inventory
Sylvia Westphal from
Zalando reported about the interaction of EAM with the innovative Open Source project
STUPS, that Zalando uses for comfortable and audit-proof deployment of their Docker microservices in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The audience was told how the whole lifecycle of an application is kept transparent by automatic synchronization from deployment into EA tool leanIX. For this an adapter was developed on basis of the
leanIX API that captures information directly from deployment and synchronises it with the EA inventory. Further integration with scanning tools are planned, for example to register data flows between applications automatically.
Everyone is talking about microservices – this is how we’ve done it
André Christ, CTO at
LeanIX, introduced the audience to the topic of microservices at LeanIX in the last presentation of the day. Microservices are – besides agile development and DevOps – one of three IT trends, which increase the relevance of a well-functioning Enterprise Architecture Management. With a greater number of highly granular services more dependencies are generated that are usually not managed centrally. LeanIX has implemented five characteristics in their microservices architecture: A comfortable login for all services via SSO (Single Sign-On), secure communication with and between APIs (oAuth), easy use of APIs thanks to interactive documentation and generated SDKs (Swagger), consistent packaging and delivery of all services independent of the platform (Docker) as well as continuous deployment with the help of green-blue deployment.
The day finished with a BBQ in the autumn sunshine on the roof terrace high above the roofs of Berlin. Participants continued to discuss the presentations and made new contacts.
The LeanIX presentation is additionally available as Slideshare:
All attendees appreciated the opportunities for good discussions as well lively exchanges between speakers and audience during the EA Connect Day. More EA Connect Days are planned in the future. Please get in touch if you are interested in participating or hosting a future event with LeanIX. If your would like to experience LeanIX for yourself,
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