The first keynote is by Arie van Bennekum, the co-author of the Agile Manifesto. From the front page of the site there are some principles they found out while developing software:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan.
Whereas there is certainly value in the items on the right, the REAL value is on the left. Agility is a word that we heard a lot on day one at WSO2Con. The Cell architecture WSO2 is working on, aims to help agile development. What is agile? Agile is a way to deliver more quickly. The presentation is about the personal journey of Arie van Bennekum and what agile could mean for you. The title is Agile as a metabolism. During his early career, he found that the way development worked, did not work for him. After a stint in Rapid Application Development (RAD) and DSDM he naturally moved to agile. Because agile will help you to innovate and deliver faster to the market as a corporate capability. But it needs to be done by the entire company / unit in order to work.
Agile is using other ways to document for instance and that can stress out an organization since it is new, and you have never done it before. Take a look at the keynote when it is put online by WSO2. It is informative and gives practical tips.
Keynote by Paul Fremantle
After Arie’s keynote, Paul Fremantle took the stage. Paul is co-founder of WSO2 and currently CTO of WSO2. Paul explains how to build agile teams taking cues from nature, math and science.
We went to smaller components over the years and separated code from interfaces. We have changed the way to store and deploy code in the cloud but also in containers and the like. According to Paul we made a lot of mistakes in SOA and he considers himself a specialist on both fields.
Agile requires a team flow for developers but often the organization hampers the creation of the flow. The wrong technology stack can also interrupt the flow. It is time for the composable Enterprise. Self-organizing teams are an enabler for an agile organization. He gives some examples from nature including the cell division starting with a zygote. Agile teams cannot have a command and control structure.
The two-pizza rule, famously from Jeff Bezos, was mentioned. If the team cannot be fed by two large (US) pizzas the team is too big. Keep this in mind when setting up teams. The analogy of the cell (in nature) is actually quite strong. The big teams doing SOA is not going to work because to lack of trust. Departments will not use other departments services because they did not develop them! Quite shocking actually but proven to be true. IF you build it, they won’t come! Where cells have boundaries and APIs are designed for boundaries.
The control plane is our human nervous system, about getting management data about. The data plane is like our blood stream moving oxygenated blood around the body. APIs will be the connection to all systems, ESB, Cells, Microservices and so on. The cells (see also yesterday’s blog) have a strong control on egress and ingress. The Cell Boundaries = Team Boundaries. Each cell needs to be owned by a team in order to work. We need to reaggregate the microservices into cells again to make it manageable again. We need a Petri dish for out self-organizing teams to grow in. Paul’s keynote can be found at the WSO2Con site some days after the conference.
API Manager: Why, What, How and What’s Next?
The WSO2 API Manager is one of the big four products of WSO2. It already has microservices capabilities with regards to the microgateway and the possibility to export an API to the (Ballerina based) microgateway.
Nuwan Dias, director at WSO2, explains what we can expect with regards to the next versions of the API Manager. Nuwan started off with an explanation of the current version to show the Why!
APIs are essential to address the problem of app explosion. It is easy to use APIs that are of course core to APP development. The Digital Transformation, or its successor, Digital Imagination make new business models and services possible.
What are the key needs of an API Manager?
- Creating and publishing APIs
- API security and rate limiting
- Platform for discovery, searching and consuming APIs
- API governance and lifecycle management
- API analytics specialization and evolution.
These 5 criteria are mapped to Maslow’s pyramid, a nice idea.
He walks through the API Manager using the 5 main criteria. This is of course the functionality that we know from the last 6 years (with some functionality added only in later versions, like the rate limiting improvement with the traffic manager).
A good question is: what is next? For the API Manager we can expect in the next version the following:
A nice set of new functionalities that really address the challenges we are facing, like a trillion endpoint / APIs.
After Nuwan’s presentation Christopher Davey took the stage. He talked about microservices and APIs. Monolithic applications are still here but not the way to go forward. Microservices make it possible to ‘make the horse go faster’, what is not possible with monoliths.
The characteristics of Microservices are:
- Componentization
- Single responsibility
- Organization around business capability
- Smart end points dumb pipes
- Mandatory ci/cd
To many microservices becomes messy and have several other issues like governance and security. Before you know it, you have a big black box of microservices. But can the gateway handle all of it? A micro gateway is possibly a solution, because they are:
- Designed to scale
- Container Native
- Supporting both private jet and group services
- CI/CD readiness
- Service discovery capabilities
From API Manager 2.5.0 the micro gateway is available to export to an autonomous gateway runtime. It supports security and rate limiting and offline analytics (into files and upload them). It can build to VM, Docker and Kubernetes.
Want to learn more?
Watch our video report below to get an impression and more highlights of day 2.
We’re looking forward to the third and last day of WSO2 CON EU 2018 which will be all about the new programming language Ballerina.
