Up the Architecture Stack with SPEaRS Architecture: Services, Processes, Events, Rules, Spaces
Eben Hewitt
Big Tent Technology Edition, Bangalore
Architectural models abound: Service-Oriented Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, Space-Based Architecture, Model-Driven Architecture, Context-Driven Architecture, Ontology-Driven Architecture, and more. We frequently are compelled to choose a single model, and drive projects toward this chosen goal; it's hard to be “driven” by more than one paradigm at once. But different architectural strategies arise to address specific problems, so we are still left with the problems that our chosen strategy was not intended to solve. Loosening coupled components, for example, can degrade performance. We want both loose coupling and great performance. We need services for interoperability, processes for business alignment, and events for dynamic processing.
We can achieve a new level of robustness and agility by positing a path using an aggregate architectural strategy, one that combines the best of different architectural approaches. But without some hard decision making and a clear model, the complexity of such an approach could be overwhelming.
This talk explores the possibilities in a proposed architectural strategy called SPEaRS (Services, Processes, Events, Rules, Spaces), which combines aspects of rich SOA, BPM, EDA, and SBA to create a flat, “tierless” architecture, with no central controller, and composed of recombinatory fragments, to address the growing demands of the modern enterprise.