Social Architecture is the practice of sharing ideas on how to solve computing common problems with industry peers. In return, the contributor hopes that their efforts will not only help to solve common problems, but ultimately their solutions will be improved by their peers and shared back leading to a cycle of continuous product improvement.
Open source software created a popular model for contributing and consuming reusable technical solutions. More recently, architects at leading companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Netflix have contributed not only open source libraries but also architectural practices. For example, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project to advance energy efficiency in data centers. The Netflix tech blog discusses the architectural decisions that they’ve implemented in their highly available production systems. The practice of sharing architectural approaches has entered mainstream computing.
Visit StackPlace for an open library of pre-built architectures
Transcend promotes the use of CloudFormation templates as a mechanism to encourage the sharing of architectures. Visit StackPlace for an open library of pre-built architectures. Use our visual workshop, StackStudio to edit, launch and adjust template architectures on AWS or ACE environments.
We believe that the next phase of Social Architecture will focus on describing the solutions by using ‘Architecture Description Languages’ (ADL) rather than free-form text or Visio diagrams. For decades, the academic community has pursued the concept of ADL’s with limited success. For an ADL to be useful, practitioners require an immediate benefit. In the cloud, that benefit has been presented in the form of ‘orchestrated provisioning’. Architects can now describe their architecture in such a precise manner that the digital description can be used by the provisioning engine to instantiate the system. The digital descriptions can describe application architectures from the perspective of components, relationships and deployment models.