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Archive for the ‘Availability’ Category



Dennis does High Availability, the full story

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

It looks like my previous post worked – Dennis put up a nice meaty blog post about his experiences applying the principles of my course to a tightly-coupled legacy code base.

Here’s the punchline:

“By using messaging, queues, and publish/subscribe patterns, we were able to upgrade a core part of our system without touching any other parts – even those that it communicates with on an ongoing basis. During the short period of time that it was down, the queues took care of buffering the communication for that service without affecting anything else. The system as a whole was never really down.

This was a totally new experience for our company – an upgrade without downtime, even with the thousands of websites we’re running.”

Read the full story.

By the way, if your in the Netherlands next week, you can catch Dennis speaking about these topics at the Dutch .NET User Group. You can get all the info and register here.



High Availability a la Dennis

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

I thought I’d give a bit of a shout-out to Dennis van der Stelt whose been applying many of the principles from my course on his project and now has something of a success story to share. Although all he put out was a little tweet about it, I think if more people bug him, we can tease some more out:

It’s not just about getting the system built quickly the first time, and it’s not just about having a maintainable code base longer term, equally important is the ability to quickly deploy major releases to the system without downtime – ‘cuz when you’re system is down, it’s not providing any business value (which is what being Agile is all about).

What do you say, Dennis? Tell us some more!

UPDATE

Dennis gives the full story here.



The Myth Of “Infinite Scalability”

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

globeScalability is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Many a client seeks me out for the first time for help in this area.

Usually the request is for an amount substantially smaller than infinity.

It’s usually on the discussion groups and in conference presentations that infinity is brought into it.

The basics

The first issue with scalability is the use of the word as an adjective: scalable.

“Is the system scalable?”

Or the similar verb use: “Does it scale?”

The problem here is the implication that there is a yes/no answer to the question.

Scalability is not boolean.

Linear Scalability

scalabilityWhen people talk about scalability, or a system being able to scale, they’re usually referring to a graph that looks something like this:

The red graph indicating a system that does not scale well, the green graph indicating one that does.

What is missing from this diagram are the labels of the axes.

The Y axis is Cost, Expense, or Money.
The X axis is usually the number of users (for internet-type companies).

Ultimately, scalability is a cost-function that will tell us how much it will cost to have the system support a certain number of users.

Linear scalability is when the cost of the next user is the same as the cost of the previous user. This means our system doesn’t have bottlenecks. This is what people usually mean when they say “infinite scalability”.

But there’s more

As many of the internet companies (and their investors) have realized over the years, there’s a difference between the number of users and the number of active users. It’s very easy to scale to a billion users when only 1000 of them are active at any given time.

To be more accurate, what we want is additional X-axes for things like total data managed by the system, number of requests per user, resource utilization per request, propagation speed (how quickly information entered by one user needs to be visible to others), and more.

Scalability is a multi-dimensional cost function, where part of an architects job is to figure out which dimensions are significant for the system/business, and what the expectation for growth is across each axis.

Preparing for “infinity”

Be careful not to optimize for only a single dimension – reality is a whole lot more complex.

There are so many other things to deal with as a system scales.

For example, do you really think you’re going to want your configuration entirely centralized? Putting everything in one place means easier management, yes, but it also means a mistake will instantly affect everyone. Is it worth the risk? Maybe instead of centralization, we could do with some automation that will allow a staged rollout of configuration changes with the ability to rollback.

The same goes for rolling out new versions, patches, and upgrades.

But that now means we may have multiple versions of the same system in production at the same time. How will that work? Will they all talk to the same database? How will we version the database then? If not, how will we handle state? Won’t this mean our code will have to be backwards compatible from one version to another? Isn’t that hard? Like, insanely hard?

Please, can we park the whole “infinite scalability” thing?
It’s really not the most important concern – not by a long shot.



High Availability Presentation

Monday, June 21st, 2010

OK – this is the last one, I promise. Well, for now, anyway.

Earlier this month at TechEd North America I gave a fairly new presentation that was only delivered once before (at the Connected Systems User Group in London) and I’m happy to say is now online for your viewing pleasure.

High Availability – A Contrarian View

Comments? Thoughts? Let me know.



Reliability, Availability, and Scalability

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

The great people at IASA have made the recording for my webcast available online:

The slides can be found here.

I also gave this talk at TechEd Barcelona and wanted to thank the attendee who posted this comment:

“You’ve done it again. Everytime I attend a session of yours I leave the room with new insights and inspiration on how to improve my software…”

You made my day.



An Answer of Scale

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

To the question of scale Ayende brings up, I thought I’d tap my concept map.

First of all, I wanted to address the relationship between various topics related to scalability:

performance topics

And on the connection between scalability and throughput:

 scalability topics

The important message here is that the scalability of a system is a cost function that gives throughput as a function of recurring costs and one time costs – servers and other hardware, and the join of buy & build:

Did you write your own locking/transaction mechanism on top of an open source distributed cache or did you buy a license for a space-based technology?

Also, don’t forget that people need to administer all the servers that you have. Those people cost money (easily100K per year). Maybe, because you haven’t invested in management or monitoring tools you need one person for every two servers. This will influence the breakdown of up front costs and recurring costs. Also, the level of availability you require will impact this as well.

In my experience, architects don’t consider often enough the operations environment in their "scalability calculations".

What this means is that there’s no such thing as technically "not being able to scale".

Rather, that the cost (up front + recurring) of supporting higher throughput grows faster than the function of revenue per user/request/whatever.

Sometimes, the solution is just to find ways to make more money per customer.

For more technical solutions, take a look at the difference between capacity and scalability and how the competing consumer pattern helps scale out.

Scalability, it’s all about the money.

Oh, I almost forgot, I also had a great conversation with Carl and Richard about scaling web sites that’s now up on the .NET Rocks site. Enjoy.



Durable Messaging Dilemmas

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

I’ve received some great feedback on my MSDN article and some really great questions that I think more people are wondering about, so I think I’ll try to do a post per question and see how that goes.

Libor asks:

“Would you recommend using durable messaging for systems where there are similar requirements with respect to data reliability as you had – ie. not losing any messages? If so, then why didn’t the final version of your solution use it? If not, can you explain why?”

The answer is, as always, it depends, but here’s on what it depends:

When designing a system, we need to take a good, hard look at how we manage state, and what properties that state has. In a system of reasonable size we can expect various families of state with respect to their business value, data volatility, and fault-tolerance window. Each family needs to be treated differently. While durable messaging may be suitable for one, it may be overkill or underkill for another.

So, here’s what we’re going to be looking at:

  1. Business Value
  2. Data Volatility
  3. Fault-Tolerance Window

Business Value

When talking about business value, I want to talk about what it means “not losing any messages”. The question is under what conditions will the messages not be lost, or rather, what are the threshold conditions where messages may start getting lost. If all our datacenters are nuked, we will lose data. It’s likely the business is OK with that (as much as can be expected under those circumstances). If a single server goes down, it’s likely the business would not be OK with losing messages containing financial data. However if a message requesting the health of a server were to get lost under those same conditions, that would probably be alright. In other words, what does that message represent in business terms.

Data Volatility

Data volatility also has an impact. Let’s say that we’re building a financial trading system. The time that it takes us to respond to an event (message) that the cost of a certain financial instrument has changed, and the message that we send requesting to buy that security is critical. Let’s say that has to be done in under 10ms. Now, some failure has occurred preventing our message from reaching its destination for 20ms. What should we do with that message? Should we keep it around, making sure it doesn’t get lost? Not in this domain. On the contrary, that message should be thrown away as its “business lifetime” has been exceeded. Furthermore, even during that original period of 10ms, the use of durable messaging may make it close to impossible to maintain our response times.

Fault-Tolerance Window

These two topics feed into the third and more architectural one – fault-tolerance window: what period of time do we require fault tolerance, and with respect to how many (and what kind of) faults? This will lead us into an analysis of to how many machines do we need to copy a message before we release the calling thread. We’d also look at in which datacenters those machines reside. This will also impact (or be impacted by) the kinds of links we have to these datacenters if we want to maintain response times. These numbers will need to change when the system identifies a disaster – degrading itself to a lower level of fault-tolerance after a hurricane knocks out a datacenter, and returning to normal once it comes back up.

Re-Evaluating Durable Messaging

Durable messaging may be used at various points in each part of the solution, but we need to look at message size, the rate those messages are being written to disk, how fast the disk is, how much available disk we have (so we don’t make things worse in the case of degraded service), etc. Companies like Amazon also take into account disk failure rates, replacement rates (disks aren’t replaced immediately you know), and many other factors when making these decisionsimage

Summary

Our job as architects when designing the system is to find that cost-benefit balance for the various parts of the system according to these very applicative parameters. No, it’s not easy. No, cloud computing will not magically solve all of this for us. But, we are getting more technical tools to work with, operations staff is getting better at working with us in the design phase, and our thought processes more rigorous in dealing with the scary conditions of the real world.

To your question, Libor, as to why we didn’t eventually use durable messaging in our solution, the answer is that we solved the overall state management problem by setting up an applicative protocol with our partners which was resilient in the face of faults by using idempotent messages that could be resent as many times as necessary. You can read more about it here. This solution isn’t viable for other kinds of interactions but was just what we needed to get the job done.

Hope that helps.



Advanced Messaging with a dash of DDD

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Following my last post (From CRUD to Domain-Driven Fluency) a bunch of questions have started popping up. One that I received via email from a client up in Ireland particularly caught my eye, so here it is:

Hi Udi, I think  I see the point about the domain-driven approach but I’m wondering what my messages will look like. If it’s this:

IAppointment InsertInterview(Guid recruiterId, Guid applicantId, Guid appointmentId); OR

IRecuiter UpdateRecuiter(IRecuiter recruiter); (passing in an operation flag attached to the IRecuiter object) OR

IRecuiter UpdateRecuiter(IRecuiter recruiter); (setting a state flag on the relevant object and have the business object check the flag and behave according the state change)

Hope I’m not way off

Sean

Well, Sean, first of all – messages don’t look like functions. They’re a lot more like structures – data transfer objects. In this case, you’d probably be looking at a ScheduleInterviewMessage that had the relevant fields. It would look something like this:

 

   1:  using System;
   2:  using NServiceBus;
   3:  using System.Xml.Serialization;
   4:   
   5:  namespace Messages
   6:  {
   7:      [Serializable]
   8:      [Recoverable]
   9:      [TimeToBeReceived("0:01:00.000")]
  10:      public class ScheduleInterviewMessage : IMessage
  11:      {
  12:          public Guid InterviewerId;
  13:          public Guid CandidateId;
  14:          public DateTime RequestedTime;
  15:   
  16:          [XmlAnyElement]
  17:          public object extra;
  18:      }
  19:  }

Before we go on, I want to explain what we see. The “recoverable” attribute is the way we indicate to the infrastructure that these messages should not be lost in case a server fails, there are network problems, etc. In essence, it does durable, store-and-forward messaging. This will create an environment in which, in the case of network problems, these messages will be written to disk. That’s a good thing, since once connectivity comes back or the server boots back up, the messages will still be around and can be sent.

Now these messages are fairly small, so even at a relatively high load, we shouldn’t be chewing through too much of our expensive, small, high performance local disks. However, if these messages were bigger, we may fill up our disks before connectivity comes back, and we all know what happens to Windows boxes when there’s no room on the file system left:

In order to prevent our system from Denial-of-Servicing itself we need to make those messages clean themselves up. That’s what the “TimeToBeReceived” attribute is for. The amount of time that if a message had not yet been received by the other side that it will be deleted. This could be that the message even made it to the other machine, but the process handling those messages was down. You wouldn’t want to be filling the other side’s disk either causing them to crash, would you? This protects both parties.

The way to figure out how long to set is by looking at the smallest amount of durable storage you have available at your nodes, divide that by the size of the average message, and then again by the rate you need to process messages – and leave yourself at least 100% spare.

In other words, to build a robust system you not only will need to deal with lost messages, but you will be actively throwing messages away.

Finally, that last “XmlAnyElement” attribute is there for versioning. As we version our system and schema, we’ll be adding fields to the message. However, an old client may be talking to a new server, or vice versa. Since we wouldn’t want data to get lost just because of serialization. In a future post, I’ll show how to set up a message handler pipeline exactly for these issues.

Now that we’ve covered all the intricacies around messaging, we can see how the code that handles that above message looks:

   1:  using System;
   2:  using Messages;
   3:  using NServiceBus;
   4:  using NHibernate;
   5:   
   6:  namespace Server
   7:  {
   8:      public class ScheduleInterviewMessageHandler :
   9:                   BaseMessageHandler<ScheduleInterviewMessage>
  10:      {
  11:          public override void Handle(ScheduleInterviewMessage message)
  12:          {
  13:              using (ISession session = SessionFactory.OpenSession())
  14:              using (ITransaction tx = session.BeginTransaction())
  15:              {
  16:                  ICandidateInterviewer interviewer = session.Get<ICandidateInterviewer>(
  17:                          message.InterviewerId);
  18:                  ICandidate candidate = session.Get<ICandidate>(
  19:                          message.CandidateId);
  20:   
  21:                  interviewer.ScheduleInterviewWith(candidate)
  22:                          .At(message.RequestedTime);
  23:   
  24:                  tx.Commit();
  25:              }
  26:   
  27:              // publish new appointment data
  28:          }
  29:      }
  30:  }

If you’ve read this far and have more questions, please feel free to send them my way. If you’re at a more time-critical part of your project and need an answer quickly, we can set up a skype call. This has been working quite well for many of my overseas clients (shout out to the guys in Ireland and Florida).

Until next time 🙂



Durable Messaging Is Not Enough

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, waiting, before outlining all the kinds of problems durable messaging doesn’t solve, I wanted to have a solution handy. Harry Pierson begins to outline the goodness that durable messaging brings to SOA, and in a later post on idempotence describes in general terms how it ties back into durable messaging and transaction – in essence describing a saga. Let’s do this in story form.

Since you’re concerned that maybe your shipping company’s servers may be down for some kind of planned (or unplanned) maintenance just as you’re trying to fulfill orders, you use a durable messaging solution there. What happens is that messages get written to disk on your end, and later the messaging tries to transfer the messages until it succeeds. So what’s wrong with that?

Well, let’s say that the shipping company’s servers went up in smoke (true story – broken down air conditioners + poor ventilation, you get the picture). Those servers aren’t going to be coming back online any second now. So, you have all these order messages buffering on your disk. Taking into account all the data, meta-data, XML, SOAP, encryption and everything, we may get up to 1MB per message.

And now’s holiday season and your company’s selling hand over fist, hundreds of orders per second from all over the world. So that means we’re eating up 100MB of disk per second, that’s 6GB a minute, and in under an hour of our shipping company’s servers going down – so do ours.

Durable messaging – yay? We don’t want to lose those orders, right? In short, durable messaging is an important part of the solution, but it’s not the whole solution.

[Continued next time…]

If you’re impatient and just want the solution, yes, nServiceBus give you all the tools you need.



Handling messages out of order

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

I wanted to follow up on my recent post, “In order messaging a myth?” by showing the exact code that solves the issue. I have a podcast waiting to come online that deals with the specifics, so keep your eye out for that too.

The important thing to note is that if we just automatically return the message to the queue, we may get “stuck” with that message if the first PolicyCreatedMessage never arrived. This opens us up to a Denial-of-Service attack by quite simply flooding us with a bunch of messages that never get cleaned up.

Anyway, the general idea is to first try the regular happy path, and only if we see that prerequisite data isn’t available, do we see if another thread may be working on that data. This is done by decreasing the isolation level of our transaction from the regular ReadCommitted to ReadUncommitted. This will enable our thread to see if some other thread inserted the policy in to the Policies table but hasn’t committed its transaction yet.

    public class PolicyApprovedMessageHandler : BaseDBMessageHandler<PolicyApprovedMessage>

    {

        public override void Handle(PolicyApprovedMessage message)

        {

            bool policyExists = true;

 

            using (ISession s = OpenSession())

            using (ITransaction tx = s.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted))

            {

                Policy p = s.Get<Policy>(message.PolicyId);

 

                if (p != null)

                {

                    p.Approve();

                    tx.Commit();

                }

                else

                    policyExists = false;

            }

 

            if (!policyExists) // check to make sure

                using (ISession s = OpenSession())

                using (ITransaction tx = s.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadUncommitted))

                {

                    Policy p = s.Get<Policy>(message.PolicyId);

 

                    if (p != null) // another thread hasn’t committed its tx yet, so try message again later

                        this.bus.HandleCurrentMessageLater();

                    else

                        this.bus.Return((int)ErrorCodes.PolicyNotFound);

                }

        }

    }

The next step will be how we take this code and make it generic, so that we don’t have write the same code over and over again for the different kinds of message handlers we have.

But that will have to wait until the next installment 🙂



   


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We now have a much better direction and, more importantly, have the confidence we need to start introducing these powerful concepts into production at Eleutian.”

Gad Rosenthal Gad Rosenthal, Department Manager at Retalix
“A thinking person. Brought fresh and valuable ideas that helped us in architecting our product. When recommending a solution he supports it with evidence and detail so you can successfully act based on it. Udi's support "comes on all levels" - As the solution architect through to the detailed class design. Trustworthy!”

Chris Bilson Chris Bilson, Developer at Russell Investment Group
“I had the pleasure of attending a workshop Udi led at the Seattle ALT.NET conference in February 2009. I have been reading Udi's articles and listening to his podcasts for a long time and have always looked to him as a source of advice on software architecture.
When I actually met him and talked to him I was even more impressed. Not only is Udi an extremely likable person, he's got that rare gift of being able to explain complex concepts and ideas in a way that is easy to understand.
All the attendees of the workshop greatly appreciate the time he spent with us and the amazing insights into service oriented architecture he shared with us.”

Alexey Shestialtynov Alexey Shestialtynov, Senior .Net Developer at Candidate Manager
“I met Udi at Candidate Manager where he was brought in part-time as a consultant to help the company make its flagship product more scalable. For me, even after 30 years in software development, working with Udi was a great learning experience. I simply love his fresh ideas and architecture insights.
As we all know it is not enough to be armed with best tools and technologies to be successful in software - there is still human factor involved. When, as it happens, the project got in trouble, management asked Udi to step into a leadership role and bring it back on track. This he did in the span of a month. I can only wish that things had been done this way from the very beginning.
I look forward to working with Udi again in the future.”

Christopher Bennage Christopher Bennage, President at Blue Spire Consulting, Inc.
“My company was hired to be the primary development team for a large scale and highly distributed application. Since these are not necessarily everyday requirements, we wanted to bring in some additional expertise. We chose Udi because of his blogging, podcasting, and speaking. We asked him to to review our architectural strategy as well as the overall viability of project.
I was very impressed, as Udi demonstrated a broad understanding of the sorts of problems we would face. His advice was honest and unbiased and very pragmatic. Whenever I questioned him on particular points, he was able to backup his opinion with real life examples. I was also impressed with his clarity and precision. He was very careful to untangle the meaning of words that might be overloaded or otherwise confusing. While Udi's hourly rate may not be the cheapest, the ROI is undoubtedly a deal. I would highly recommend consulting with Udi.”

Robert Lewkovich, Product / Development Manager at Eggs Overnight
“Udi's advice and consulting were a huge time saver for the project I'm responsible for. The $ spent were well worth it and provided me with a more complete understanding of nServiceBus and most importantly in helping make the correct architectural decisions earlier thereby reducing later, and more expensive, rework.”

Ray Houston Ray Houston, Director of Development at TOPAZ Technologies
“Udi's SOA class made me smart - it was awesome.

The class was very well put together. The materials were clear and concise and Udi did a fantastic job presenting it. It was a good mixture of lecture, coding, and question and answer. I fully expected that I would be taking notes like crazy, but it was so well laid out that the only thing I wrote down the entire course was what I wanted for lunch. Udi provided us with all the lecture materials and everyone has access to all of the samples which are in the nServiceBus trunk.

Now I know why Udi is the "Software Simplist." I was amazed to find that all the code and solutions were indeed very simple. The patterns that Udi presented keep things simple by isolating complexity so that it doesn't creep into your day to day code. The domain code looks the same if it's running in a single process or if it's running in 100 processes.”

Ian Cooper Ian Cooper, Team Lead at Beazley
“Udi is one of the leaders in the .Net development community, one of the truly smart guys who do not just get best architectural practice well enough to educate others but drives innovation. Udi consistently challenges my thinking in ways that make me better at what I do.”

Liron Levy, Team Leader at Rafael
“I've met Udi when I worked as a team leader in Rafael. One of the most senior managers there knew Udi because he was doing superb architecture job in another Rafael project and he recommended bringing him on board to help the project I was leading.
Udi brought with him fresh solutions and invaluable deep architecture insights. He is an authority on SOA (service oriented architecture) and this was a tremendous help in our project.
On the personal level - Udi is a great communicator and can persuade even the most difficult audiences (I was part of such an audience myself..) by bringing sound explanations that draw on his extensive knowledge in the software business. Working with Udi was a great learning experience for me, and I'll be happy to work with him again in the future.”

Adam Dymitruk Adam Dymitruk, Director of IT at Apara Systems
“I met Udi for the first time at DevTeach in Montreal back in early 2007. While Udi is usually involved in SOA subjects, his knowledge spans all of a software development company's concerns. I would not hesitate to recommend Udi for any company that needs excellent leadership, mentoring, problem solving, application of patterns, implementation of methodologies and straight out solution development.
There are very few people in the world that are as dedicated to their craft as Udi is to his. At ALT.NET Seattle, Udi explained many core ideas about SOA. The team that I brought with me found his workshop and other talks the highlight of the event and provided the most value to us and our organization. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to recommend him.”

Eytan Michaeli Eytan Michaeli, CTO Korentec
“Udi was responsible for a major project in the company, and as a chief architect designed a complex multi server C4I system with many innovations and excellent performance.”


Carl Kenne Carl Kenne, .Net Consultant at Dotway AB
“Udi's session "DDD in Enterprise apps" was truly an eye opener. Udi has a great ability to explain complex enterprise designs in a very comprehensive and inspiring way. I've seen several sessions on both DDD and SOA in the past, but Udi puts it in a completly new perspective and makes us understand what it's all really about. If you ever have a chance to see any of Udi's sessions in the future, take it!”

Avi Nehama, R&D Project Manager at Retalix
“Not only that Udi is a briliant software architecture consultant, he also has remarkable abilities to present complex ideas in a simple and concise manner, and...
always with a smile. Udi is indeed a top-league professional!”

Ben Scheirman Ben Scheirman, Lead Developer at CenterPoint Energy
“Udi is one of those rare people who not only deeply understands SOA and domain driven design, but also eloquently conveys that in an easy to grasp way. He is patient, polite, and easy to talk to. I'm extremely glad I came to his workshop on SOA.”

Scott C. Reynolds Scott C. Reynolds, Director of Software Engineering at CBLPath
“Udi is consistently advancing the state of thought in software architecture, service orientation, and domain modeling.
His mastery of the technologies and techniques is second to none, but he pairs that with a singular ability to listen and communicate effectively with all parties, technical and non, to help people arrive at context-appropriate solutions. Every time I have worked with Udi, or attended a talk of his, or just had a conversation with him I have come away from it enriched with new understanding about the ideas discussed.”

Evgeny-Hen Osipow, Head of R&D at PCLine
“Udi has helped PCLine on projects by implementing architectural blueprints demonstrating the value of simple design and code.”

Rhys Campbell Rhys Campbell, Owner at Artemis West
“For many years I have been following the works of Udi. His explanation of often complex design and architectural concepts are so cleanly broken down that even the most junior of architects can begin to understand these concepts. These concepts however tend to typify the "real world" problems we face daily so even the most experienced software expert will find himself in an "Aha!" moment when following Udi teachings.
It was a pleasure to finally meet Udi in Seattle Alt.Net OpenSpaces 2008, where I was pleasantly surprised at how down-to-earth and approachable he was. His depth and breadth of software knowledge also became apparent when discussion with his peers quickly dove deep in to the problems we current face. If given the opportunity to work with or recommend Udi I would quickly take that chance. When I think .Net Architecture, I think Udi.”

Sverre Hundeide Sverre Hundeide, Senior Consultant at Objectware
“Udi had been hired to present the third LEAP master class in Oslo. He is an well known international expert on enterprise software architecture and design, and is the author of the open source messaging framework nServiceBus. The entire class was based on discussion and interaction with the audience, and the only Power Point slide used was the one showing the agenda.
He started out with sketching a naive traditional n-tier application (big ball of mud), and based on suggestions from the audience we explored different solutions which might improve the solution. Whatever suggestions we threw at him, he always had a thoroughly considered answer describing pros and cons with the suggested solution. He obviously has a lot of experience with real world enterprise SOA applications.”

Raphaël Wouters Raphaël Wouters, Owner/Managing Partner at Medinternals
“I attended Udi's excellent course 'Advanced Distributed System Design with SOA and DDD' at Skillsmatter. Few people can truly claim such a high skill and expertise level, present it using a pragmatic, concrete no-nonsense approach and still stay reachable.”

Nimrod Peleg Nimrod Peleg, Lab Engineer at Technion IIT
“One of the best programmers and software engineer I've ever met, creative, knows how to design and implemet, very collaborative and finally - the applications he designed implemeted work for many years without any problems!

Jose Manuel Beas
“When I attended Udi's SOA Workshop, then it suddenly changed my view of what Service Oriented Architectures were all about. Udi explained complex concepts very clearly and created a very productive discussion environment where all the attendees could learn a lot. I strongly recommend hiring Udi.”

Daniel Jin Daniel Jin, Senior Lead Developer at PJM Interconnection
“Udi is one of the top SOA guru in the .NET space. He is always eager to help others by sharing his knowledge and experiences. His blog articles often offer deep insights and is a invaluable resource. I highly recommend him.”

Pasi Taive Pasi Taive, Chief Architect at Tieto
“I attended both of Udi's "UI Composition Key to SOA Success" and "DDD in Enterprise Apps" sessions and they were exceptionally good. I will definitely participate in his sessions again. Udi is a great presenter and has the ability to explain complex issues in a manner that everyone understands.”

Eran Sagi, Software Architect at HP
“So far, I heard about Service Oriented architecture all over. Everyone mentions it – the big buzz word. But, when I actually asked someone for what does it really mean, no one managed to give me a complete satisfied answer. Finally in his excellent course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, I got the answers I was looking for. Udi went over the different motivations (principles) of Services Oriented, explained them well one by one, and showed how each one could be technically addressed using NService bus. In his course, Udi also explain the way of thinking when coming to design a Service Oriented system. What are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to shape your system, place the logic in the right places for best Service Oriented system.

I would recommend this course for any architect or developer who deals with distributed system, but not only. In my work we do not have a real distributed system, but one PC which host both the UI application and the different services inside, all communicating via WCF. I found that many of the architecture principles and motivations of SOA apply for our system as well. Enough that you have SW partitioned into components and most of the principles becomes relevant to you as well. Bottom line – an excellent course recommended to any SW Architect, or any developer dealing with distributed system.”

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