The Art of Solution Architecture

The "Art" has a communicative purpose by which ideas, emotions and world view are expressed; but also to illustrate and stimulate to the action. This makes a motivator for the architect to the extent that gives elements to observe, abstract, design, model, innovate, create and communicate to build innovative proposals to facilitate the activities of the humans on the organizations.

Based on these contributions of art, and of course, science and technology, the purpose of this book arises: a practical guide providing accessibles recommendations and orientations to implement Architectures.

I invite you to read this wonderful. Book

IBM Bluemix Architecture Using the Microservices

There are tree types of IBM Cloud platform.

• Public: PassS environment leveraging Softlayer virtual servers on Internet, quicly productive with architecture multi tenant. 
• Dedicated: Is your own exclusive Softlayer environment yhat’s securely connected to both the public Bluemix and your own network (VPN) or a direct network connection with architecture single tenant.
• Local: In on your own datacenter with OpenStack or VMWare, is more expensive for the process capability that require for bluemix, with architecture single tenant.

On bluemix, your organization could find service across for mobile, IoT, Watson and other services for other kind of applications.

Your organization need to evaluate and choose what critical components, can be run on the Public Cloud, Private Cloud or maybe on your own datacenter.

For example, for a mobile application that could be consume services provided by the different components deployed on NodeJS, java or other on bluemix through the communication protocol HTTP (REST).

¿What do you need?

• Reuse all that you have on your solution/organization an project.
• Choose the appropriate micro-services.
• Ensure the security of your business.
• Auto-scaling, High Ability (HA) and all related with alternatives, decisions, restrictions of the architecture.

Example High level Solution Architecture with micro-services

Proxy: Component developed in NodeJS, which functions as a gateway mobile applications, manages incoming requests, referring them to the internal component responsible for processing, through the services or operations configured in API Management. In addition, this server is responsible for masking data and keep in cache (quickly access), using Cache.

Cache: bluemix service that do the masking information to the end user, to ensure security in the public cloud, so that different identifiers maintained in session can not be traced, preventing them can access information from intruders. Also, this service charge to maintain recent and frequently consulted for faster data access.

API Management: bluemix Service that manages and consume services that are exposed in the public cloud, on the other deployed components bluemix.

Database: Service database bluemix (DBaaS), in which all the information managed by the components deployed in bluemix persisted.

Workload Scheduler: bluemix service that allows, through previous configuration automatically make calls to REST services.

The other components depend of infrastructure client, buy in general there are many layers of security before to arrive to applications as a Firewall, Identity Provider, gateways, ESB, applications, etc. For example, on bluemix you can integrated to a Federate authentication on the customer.