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  • Load balancing using Mina example with Java DSL

    - by Flame_Phoenix
    So, recently I started learning Camel. As part of the process I decided to go through all the examples (listed HERE and available when you DOWNLOAD the package with all the examples and docs) and to see what I could learn. One of the examples, Load Balancing using Mina caught my attention because it uses a Mina in different JVM's and it simulates a load balancer with round robin. I have a few problems with this example. First it uses the Spring DSL, instead of the Java DSL which my project uses and which I find a lot easier to understand now (mainly also because I am used to it). So the first question: is there a version of this example using only the Java DSL instead of the Spring DSL for the routes and the beans? My second questions is code related. The description states, and I quote: Within this demo every ten seconds, a Report object is created from the Camel load balancer server. This object is sent by the Camel load balancer to a MINA server where the object is then serialized. One of the two MINA servers (localhost:9991 and localhost:9992) receives the object and enriches the message by setting the field reply of the Report object. The reply is sent back by the MINA server to the client, which then logs the reply on the console. So, from what I read, I understand that the MINA server 1 (per example) receives a report from the loadbalancer, changes it, and then it sends that report back to some invisible client. Upon checking the code, I see no client java class or XML and when I run, the server simply posts the results on the command line. Where is the client ?? What is this client? In the MINA 1server code presented here: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:camel="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring" xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring/camel-spring.xsd"> <bean id="service" class="org.apache.camel.example.service.Reporting"/> <camelContext xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring"> <route id="mina1"> <from uri="mina:tcp://localhost:9991"/> <setHeader headerName="minaServer"> <constant>localhost:9991</constant> </setHeader> <bean ref="service" method="updateReport"/> </route> </camelContext> </beans> I don't understand how the updateReport method magically prints the object on my console. What if I wanted to send message to a third MINA server? How would I do it? (I would have to add a new route, and send it to the URI of the 3rd server correct?) I know most of these questions may sound dumb, but I would appreciate if anyone could help me. A Java DSL version of this would really help me.

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  • How to Achieve OC4J RMI Load Balancing

    - by fip
    This is an old, Oracle SOA and OC4J 10G topic. In fact this is not even a SOA topic per se. Questions of RMI load balancing arise when you developed custom web applications accessing human tasks running off a remote SOA 10G cluster. Having returned from a customer who faced challenges with OC4J RMI load balancing, I felt there is still some confusions in the field how OC4J RMI load balancing work. Hence I decide to dust off an old tech note that I wrote a few years back and share it with the general public. Here is the tech note: Overview A typical use case in Oracle SOA is that you are building web based, custom human tasks UI that will interact with the task services housed in a remote BPEL 10G cluster. Or, in a more generic way, you are just building a web based application in Java that needs to interact with the EJBs in a remote OC4J cluster. In either case, you are talking to an OC4J cluster as RMI client. Then immediately you must ask yourself the following questions: 1. How do I make sure that the web application, as an RMI client, even distribute its load against all the nodes in the remote OC4J cluster? 2. How do I make sure that the web application, as an RMI client, is resilient to the node failures in the remote OC4J cluster, so that in the unlikely case when one of the remote OC4J nodes fail, my web application will continue to function? That is the topic of how to achieve load balancing with OC4J RMI client. Solutions You need to configure and code RMI load balancing in two places: 1. Provider URL can be specified with a comma separated list of URLs, so that the initial lookup will land to one of the available URLs. 2. Choose a proper value for the oracle.j2ee.rmi.loadBalance property, which, along side with the PROVIDER_URL property, is one of the JNDI properties passed to the JNDI lookup.(http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31017_01/web.1013/b28958/rmi.htm#BABDGFBI) More details below: About the PROVIDER_URL The JNDI property java.name.provider.url's job is, when the client looks up for a new context at the very first time in the client session, to provide a list of RMI context The value of the JNDI property java.name.provider.url goes by the format of a single URL, or a comma separate list of URLs. A single URL. For example: opmn:ormi://host1:6003:oc4j_instance1/appName1 A comma separated list of multiple URLs. For examples:  opmn:ormi://host1:6003:oc4j_instanc1/appName, opmn:ormi://host2:6003:oc4j_instance1/appName, opmn:ormi://host3:6003:oc4j_instance1/appName When the client looks up for a new Context the very first time in the client session, it sends a query against the OPMN referenced by the provider URL. The OPMN host and port specifies the destination of such query, and the OC4J instance name and appName are actually the “where clause” of the query. When the PROVIDER URL reference a single OPMN server Let's consider the case when the provider url only reference a single OPMN server of the destination cluster. In this case, that single OPMN server receives the query and returns a list of the qualified Contexts from all OC4Js within the cluster, even though there is a single OPMN server in the provider URL. A context represent a particular starting point at a particular server for subsequent object lookup. For example, if the URL is opmn:ormi://host1:6003:oc4j_instance1/appName, then, OPMN will return the following contexts: appName on oc4j_instance1 on host1 appName on oc4j_instance1 on host2, appName on oc4j_instance1 on host3,  (provided that host1, host2, host3 are all in the same cluster) Please note that One OPMN will be sufficient to find the list of all contexts from the entire cluster that satisfy the JNDI lookup query. You can do an experiment by shutting down appName on host1, and observe that OPMN on host1 will still be able to return you appname on host2 and appName on host3. When the PROVIDER URL reference a comma separated list of multiple OPMN servers When the JNDI propery java.naming.provider.url references a comma separated list of multiple URLs, the lookup will return the exact same things as with the single OPMN server: a list of qualified Contexts from the cluster. The purpose of having multiple OPMN servers is to provide high availability in the initial context creation, such that if OPMN at host1 is unavailable, client will try the lookup via OPMN on host2, and so on. After the initial lookup returns and cache a list of contexts, the JNDI URL(s) are no longer used in the same client session. That explains why removing the 3rd URL from the list of JNDI URLs will not stop the client from getting the EJB on the 3rd server. About the oracle.j2ee.rmi.loadBalance Property After the client acquires the list of contexts, it will cache it at the client side as “list of available RMI contexts”.  This list includes all the servers in the destination cluster. This list will stay in the cache until the client session (JVM) ends. The RMI load balancing against the destination cluster is happening at the client side, as the client is switching between the members of the list. Whether and how often the client will fresh the Context from the list of Context is based on the value of the  oracle.j2ee.rmi.loadBalance. The documentation at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31017_01/web.1013/b28958/rmi.htm#BABDGFBI list all the available values for the oracle.j2ee.rmi.loadBalance. Value Description client If specified, the client interacts with the OC4J process that was initially chosen at the first lookup for the entire conversation. context Used for a Web client (servlet or JSP) that will access EJBs in a clustered OC4J environment. If specified, a new Context object for a randomly-selected OC4J instance will be returned each time InitialContext() is invoked. lookup Used for a standalone client that will access EJBs in a clustered OC4J environment. If specified, a new Context object for a randomly-selected OC4J instance will be created each time the client calls Context.lookup(). Please note the regardless of the setting of oracle.j2ee.rmi.loadBalance property, the “refresh” only occurs at the client. The client can only choose from the "list of available context" that was returned and cached from the very first lookup. That is, the client will merely get a new Context object from the “list of available RMI contexts” from the cache at the client side. The client will NOT go to the OPMN server again to get the list. That also implies that if you are adding a node to the server cluster AFTER the client’s initial lookup, the client would not know it because neither the server nor the client will initiate a refresh of the “list of available servers” to reflect the new node. About High Availability (i.e. Resilience Against Node Failure of Remote OC4J Cluster) What we have discussed above is about load balancing. Let's also discuss high availability. This is how the High Availability works in RMI: when the client use the context but get an exception such as socket is closed, it knows that the server referenced by that Context is problematic and will try to get another unused Context from the “list of available contexts”. Again, this list is the list that was returned and cached at the very first lookup in the entire client session.

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  • Load balancing a console application or service

    - by David
    So it's easy to load balance an ASP.NET web application. You set up a load balancer between two servers, and if the web server isn't responding on Port 80, it won't receive requests. Are there any proven techniques for doing this for a C# console application or Windows service that takes actions of its own volition? Are there any frameworks for knowing if peer processes are alive or dead, doing heartbeats, etc? I've been experimenting a bit with NServiceBus and it seems like, for certain kinds of applications, it would help to have most of the work done as a response to an event, which makes it more like a web application, actually, and therefore easier to scale and load balance with multiple processes, but I feel like that's a half-baked solution since in most cases there usually needs to be some concept of a "master" process that's responsible for getting work started.

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  • Heuristic algorithm for load balancing among threads.

    - by Il-Bhima
    I'm working on a multithreaded program where I have a number of worker threads performing tasks of unequal length. I want to load-balance the tasks to ensure that they do roughly the same amount of work. For task T_i I have a number c_i which provides a good approximation to the amount of work that is required for that task. I'm looking for an efficient (O(N) N = num tasks or better) algorithm which will give me "roughly" a good load balance given the values of c_i. It doesn't have to be optimal, but I would like to be able to have some theoretical bounds on how bad the resulting allocations are. Any ideas?

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  • IIS load balancing and site deployment

    - by KLC
    Hi, currently I have a site sits on one IIS7 server. When we deploy a new version of the site, we bring the site down and display an offline page. What I really want is have two same exact copies of the site sits in one IIS 7 server and load balance users among both servers. when we deploy a new version of the site, we will bring site1 down (users in site1 automatically routes to site2 on next postback), when site1 deployment is complete, bring site2 down (users in site2 being routes to site1 on next postback). is this even possible?

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  • How does load balancing work with multiple server with multiple DBs

    - by Matt
    I guess what im looking for is a description on how this all works together. I'm used to setting up one server with maybe another server to handel the DB. My question is how does the load balancer work where do all the script(php,python) files go? If i make a change to one i have to rsync them to all the server that the balancer refers to? Also does each server need client side DB's installed so they can reference the DB's that are on other servers? If there is a site that explains all this i would be happy to read it.

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  • Load Balancing and Failover for Read-Only PostgreSQL Database

    - by Eric J.
    Scenario Multiple application servers host web services written in Java, running in SpringSource dm Server. To implement a new requirement, they will need to query a read-only PostgreSQL database. Issue To support redundancy, at least two PostgreSQL instances will be running. Access to PostgreSQL must be load balanced and must auto-fail over to currently running instances if an instance should go down. Auto-discovery of newly running instances is desirable but not required. Research I have reviewed the official PostgreSQL documentation on this issue. However, that focuses on the more general case of read/write access to the database. Top google results tend to lead to older newsgroup messages or dead projects such as Sequoia or DB Balancer, as well as one active project PG Pool II Question What are your real-world experiences with PG Pool II? What other simple and reliable alternatives are available?

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  • Load balancing and shedulling algorithms .NET

    - by Lukas Šalkauskas
    Hello there, so here is my problem: I have several different configuarion servers. I have different calculations (jobs), I can predict how long approx. each job will take to be caclulated. Also I have priorities. My question is how to keep all machines loaded 99-100% and shedule the jobs in the best way. Each machine can do several calculations at the time. Jobs are pushed to the machine. Central machine knows current load of each machine. Also I would like to to assign some king of machine learning here, because I will know statistics of each job (started, finished, cpu load etc.). How to distribute jobs(calculations) in the best possible way, also keep in mind priority. Any suggestions ? Ideas ? Algorithms ?

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  • Load balancing and scheduling algorithms.

    - by Lukas Šalkauskas
    Hello there, so here is my problem: I have several different configuarion servers. I have different calculations (jobs); I can predict how long approximately each job will take to be caclulated. Also, I have priorities. My question is how to keep all machines loaded 99-100% and schedule the jobs in the best way. Each machine can do several calculations at a time. Jobs are pushed to the machine. The central machine knows the current load of each machine. Also, I would like to to assign some kind of machine learning here, because I will know statistics of each job (started, finished, cpu load etc.). How can I distribute jobs (calculations) in the best possible way, keeping in mind the priorities? Any suggestions, ideas, or algorithms ? FYI: My platform .NET.

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  • .net load balancing for server

    - by user1439111
    Some time ago I wrote server software which is currently running at it's max. (3k users average). So I decided to rewrite certain parts so I can run the software at another server to balance it's load. I can't simply start another instance of the server since there is some data which has to be available to all users. So I was thinking of creating a small manager and all the servers connect and send their (relevant)data to the manager. But it also got me thinking about another problem. The manager could also reach it's limits which is exactly what i'm trying to prevent in the future. So I would like to know how I could fix this problem. (I have already tried to optimize critical parts of the software but I can't optimize it forever)

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  • Tuxedo Load Balancing

    - by Todd Little
    A question I often receive is how does Tuxedo perform load balancing.  This is often asked by customers that see an imbalance in the number of requests handled by servers offering a specific service. First of all let me say that Tuxedo really does load or request optimization instead of load balancing.  What I mean by that is that Tuxedo doesn't attempt to ensure that all servers offering a specific service get the same number of requests, but instead attempts to ensure that requests are processed in the least amount of time.   Simple round robin "load balancing" can be employed to ensure that all servers for a particular service are given the same number of requests.  But the question I ask is, "to what benefit"?  Instead Tuxedo scans the queues (which may or may not correspond to servers based upon SSSQ - Single Server Single Queue or MSSQ - Multiple Server Single Queue) to determine on which queue a request should be placed.  The scan is always performed in the same order and during the scan if a queue is empty the request is immediately placed on that queue and request routing is done.  However, should all the queues be busy, meaning that requests are currently being processed, Tuxedo chooses the queue with the least amount of "work" queued to it where work is the sum of all the requests queued weighted by their "load" value as defined in the UBBCONFIG file.  What this means is that under light loads, only the first few queues (servers) process all the requests as an empty queue is often found before reaching the end of the scan.  Thus the first few servers in the queue handle most of the requests.  While this sounds non-optimal, in fact it capitalizes on the underlying operating systems and hardware behavior to produce the best possible performance.  Round Robin scheduling would spread the requests across all the available servers and thus require all of them to be in memory, and likely not share much in the way of hardware or memory caches.  Tuxedo's system maximizes the various caches and thus optimizes overall performance.  Hopefully this makes sense and now explains why you may see a few servers handling most of the requests.  Under heavy load, meaning enough load to keep all servers that can handle a request busy, you should see a relatively equal number of requests processed.  Next post I'll try and cover how this applies to servers in a clustered (MP) environment because the load balancing there is a little more complicated. Regards,Todd LittleOracle Tuxedo Chief Architect

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  • MMORPG game balancing

    - by Gary Paluk
    I've seen a couple of examples of some game balancing techniques in books yet they are not comprehensive and not particularly aimed at MMORPGs but I'm looking for practical examples of game balancing techniques for MMORPGs. I am interested to know if anyone has documented the techniques used in popular games with proven success in this area. Ideally, any resource would cover most common types of stats and include layman mathematical models or techniques used to balance game mechanics found in advanced MMORPGs (I know it's a cliché, but WoW style) Any help would be great!

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  • When using TCP load balancing with HAProxy, does all outbound traffic flow through the LB?

    - by user122875
    I am setting up an app to be hosted using VMs(probably amazon, but that is not set in stone) which will require both HTTP load balancing and load balancing a large number(50k or so if possible) of persistant TCP connections. The amount of data is not all that high, but updates are frequent. Right now I am evaluating load balancers and am a bit confused about the architecture of HAProxy. If I use HAProxy to balance the TCP connections, will all the resulting traffic have to flow through the load balancer? If so, would another solution(such as LVS or even nginx_tcp_proxy_module) be a better fit?

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  • What other ways can I load balance EC2 servers without using Elastic Load Balancing?

    - by undefined
    I have a web application that consists of a web server managed by a web hosting firm, a set of EC2 instances in amazons cloud and a MySQL database (hosted on the webserver). MySQL is behind a firewall and is set to allow access from Localhost and from a single IP address which is an Amazon Elastic IP address that is attached to the EC2 instance I have been running up to now. The problem is that I want to look at my scaling up and load balancing strategy for my EC2 instance. To this end I have been investigating the Elastic Load Balancers and Autoscaling tools that Amazon provides and have managed to set this up fine but for one thing - connecting to the MySQL database running on my webserver. I realised (thanks to answers on Serverfault) that I needed to check firewall settings and add the IP address for the load balancer, however Elastic Load Balancers provide you with a DNS name, not an IP address and infact the IP addresses change over time so this will not work. I have been told by the company hosting the database that the way the firewall works is to look up the IP address of the DNS name and store the IP rather than the DNS name. so basically this will not work and the only way to allow access would be to open up the SQL port to allow access from anyone! Is this a viable idea? Should I look at moving my database into the cloud? Is there another firewall that the server company can use? Should I find another way of load balancing (if so what?) tricky one eh? any help appreciated!

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  • Load Balancing is unusual in Apache in round-robin mode when one of the tomcat is brought down

    - by srayker
    We are facing a unusual behavior with round-robin load balancing on apache when one of the tomcat server is brought down. Our Setup: we have 2 apache web servers on the front end using mod_jk module for load balancing using round robin for load distribution. We also have enabled session stickyness. This is followed by 4 tomcat servers on which the applications are running. Sometimes under heavy load, if there is a slowness in our DB tier we find that eventually one of the tomcat goes into a hung state and would need a restart. The moment we bounce the tomcat we see a spike in requests in one of the server and this would also go into hung state and need a restart. Eventually all the server will face similar condition. What beats me is why does the Apache transfer the whole load to one server instead of distributing the load. We are now trying the worker.balancer.method=B to see if this helps to resolve our issue. Any thoughts on resolving the issue is greatly appreciated. regards, srayker

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  • NAT and ISP Subnet when load balancing on pfsense?

    - by dannymcc
    I have a pfsense box that I'm trying to plan the configuration for. I am going to be load balancing two ISP's, each with their own /29 static IP subnet. The question I have is in relation to the way those IP's are associated with workstations on the local network. Currently I have some workstations with local (192.168.1.0/29) IP addresses, and other more complicated workstation setups have their own public IP address. Some of the more complicated systems have a NAT 1:1 configuration where I forward a public IP address to a local IP address. Others however are directly on the ISP subnet and cannot be seen on our local network. Is this configuration possible with pfsense? If so, what terms should I be looking through the documentation for? Here is a simple/brief diagram of what I am trying to achieve.

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  • LAMP Server without single failure point + Global Server Load Balancing?

    - by José Nobile
    I want implement a LAMP Server (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) without a single failure point and with Global Server Load Balancing. I have a server in Cali, Colombia, and other server will be installed in Melbourne, Australia, user in America can use the Cali Server and in Europe, Asia, Africa or Oceania use the Melbourne Server. If any server fail (or load is excessively high), a server must answer all request. Data in MYSQL must be in sync, php files, any configuration in both server must be in sync. I read about of Google DNS Server 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and ANY Cast, also about MySQL semisynchronous replication and MySQL Cluster, but what about other things, as crontabs, and the configurations in server? The solution can't depend of APNIC or BGP, only open source software running in Linux.

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  • When load balancing, must all copies of static web page be exactly the same?

    - by Gilles Blanchette
    I am used to get answers for everything on the web, but not this time... Yesterday I enable Amazon DNS weight functionally to load balance 7 websites between two different IP addresses (split 50%-50%). Both servers run IIS 8.5, sites runs well on both sides. Today I found out that Google WebMasterTools is reporting fails error with file robots.txt, all close to 50% of access try errors. The robots.txt file is ok and accessible (even via Google testing URL page) on both servers. Lets say current version of static web pages are on the first computer and the updated version of the same web pages are on the second computer. Can it be the problem? When load balancing, can static web pages be slightly different from one host server to the other? Thank you for your help

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  • Biztalk - how do I set up MSMQ load balancing and high availability ?

    - by FullOfQuestions
    Hi, From what I understand, in order to achieve MSMQ load-balancing, one must use a technology such as NLB. And in order to achieve MSMQ high-availability, one must cluster the related Biztalk Host (and hence the underlying servers have to be in a cluster themselves). Yet, according to Microsoft Documentation, NLB and FailOver Clustering technologies are not compatible. See this link for reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/235305 Can anyone PLEASE explain to me how MSMQ load-balancing and high-availability can be achieved? thank you in advance, M

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  • Network Balancing Act

    - by listey
    Next up in our popular Oracle Solaris How To series is the Integrated Load Balancer, part of the suite of network facilities that are built in to Oracle Solaris 11. Providing Layer 3 and Layer 4 load balancing capabilities you can use this device to simulate or even replace your hardware based network infrastructure. Read more about the capabilities and how to get a basic configuration working in How to Set Up a Load-Balanced Application Across Two Oracle Solaris Zones

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  • apache & load balancing?

    - by Mani
    In apache, mod_proxy_balancer support loan balancing in the easiest way. My question is: Please refer the https://blogs.oracle.com/oswald/entry/easy_http_load_balancing_with When the result the request is processed by workers (load balancing nodes), it comes to load balancing server and then go to client or directly from workers it goes ? plz answer me. Example: Method 1: Web Client -- Load Balancer - Worker - Load Balancer - Web Client OR Method 2: Web Client -- Load Balancer - Worker - Web Client What is happening in apache load balancer ?

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  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #2 - Balancing the forces

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/02/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---2---balancing-the-forces.aspxCategorizing requirements is the prerequisite for ecconomic architectural decisions. Not all requirements are created equal. However, to truely understand and describe the requirement forces pulling on software development, I think further examination of the requirements aspects is varranted. Aspects of Functionality There are two sides to Functionality requirements. It´s about what a software should do. I call that the Operations it implements. Operations are defined by expressions and control structures or calls to frameworks of some sort, i.e. (business) logic statements. Operations calculate, transform, aggregate, validate, send, receive, load, store etc. Operations are about behavior; they take input and produce output by considering state. I´m not using the term “function” here, because functions - or methods or sub-programs - are not necessary to implement Operations. Functions belong to a different sub-aspect of requirements (see below). Operations alone are not enough, though, to make a customer happy with regard to his/her Functionality requirements. Only correctly implemented Operations provide full value. This should make clear, why testing is so important. And not just manual tests during development of some operational feature, but automated tests. Because only automated tests scale when over time the number of operations increases. Without automated tests there is no guarantee formerly correct operations are still correct after more got added. To retest all previous operations manually is infeasible. So whoever relies just on manual tests is not really balancing the two forces Operations and Correctness. With manual tests more weight is put on the side of the scale of Operations. That might be ok for a short period of time - but in the long run it will bite you. You need to plan for Correctness in the long run from the first day of your project on. Aspects of Quality As important as Functionality is, it´s not the driver for software development. No software has ever been written to just implement some operation in code. We don´t need computers just to do something. All computers can do with software we can do without them. Well, at least given enough time and resources. We could calculate the most complex formulas without computers. We could do auctions with millions of people without computers. The only reason we want computers to help us with this and a million other Operations is… We don´t want to wait for the results very long. Or we want less errors. Or we want easier accessability to complicated solutions. So the main reason for customers to buy/order software is some Quality. They want some Functionality with a higher Quality (e.g. performance, scalability, usability, security…) than without the software. But Qualities come in at least two flavors: Most important are Primary Qualities. That´s the Qualities software truely is written for. Take an online auction website for example. Its Primary Qualities are performance, scalability, and usability, I´d say. Auctions should come within reach of millions of people; setting up an auction should be very easy; finding a suitable auction and bidding on it should be as fast as possible. Only if those Qualities have been implemented does security become relevant. A secure auction website is important - but not as important as a fast auction website. Nobody would want to use the most secure auction website if it was unbearably slow. But there would be people willing to use the fastest auction website even it was lacking security. That´s why security - with regard to online auction software - is not a Primary Quality, but just a Secondary Quality. It´s a supporting quality, so to speak. It does not deliver value by itself. With a password manager software this might be different. There security might be a Primary Quality. Please get me right: I don´t want to denigrate any Quality. There´s a long list of non-functional requirements at Wikipedia. They are all created equal - but that does not mean they are equally important for all software projects. When confronted with Quality requirements check with the customer which are primary and which are secondary. That will help to make good economical decisions when in a crunch. Resources are always limited - but requirements are a bottomless ocean. Aspects of Security of Investment Functionality and Quality are traditionally the requirement aspects cared for most - by customers and developers alike. Even today, when pressure rises in a project, tunnel vision will focus on them. Any measures to create and hold up Security of Investment (SoI) will be out of the window pretty quickly. Resistance to customers and/or management is futile. As long as SoI is not placed on equal footing with Functionality and Quality it´s bound to suffer under pressure. To look closer at what SoI means will help to become more conscious about it and make customers and management aware of the risks of neglecting it. SoI to me has two facets: Production Efficiency (PE) is about speed of delivering value. Customers like short response times. Short response times mean less money spent. So whatever makes software development faster supports this requirement. This must not lead to duct tape programming and banging out features by the dozen, though. Because customers don´t just want Operations and Quality, but also Correctness. So if Correctness gets compromised by focussing too much on Production Efficiency it will fire back. Customers want PE not just today, but over the whole course of a software´s lifecycle. That means, it´s not just about coding speed, but equally about code quality. If code quality leads to rework the PE is on an unsatisfactory level. Also if code production leads to waste it´s unsatisfactory. Because the effort which went into waste could have been used to produce value. Rework and waste cost money. Rework and waste abound, however, as long as PE is not addressed explicitly with management and customers. Thanks to the Agile and Lean movements that´s increasingly the case. Nevertheless more could and should be done in many teams. Each and every developer should keep in mind that Production Efficiency is as important to the customer as Functionality and Quality - whether he/she states it or not. Making software development more efficient is important - but still sooner or later even agile projects are going to hit a glas ceiling. At least as long as they neglect the second SoI facet: Evolvability. Delivering correct high quality functionality in short cycles today is good. But not just any software structure will allow this to happen for an indefinite amount of time.[1] The less explicitly software was designed the sooner it´s going to get stuck. Big ball of mud, monolith, brownfield, legacy code, technical debt… there are many names for software structures that have lost the ability to evolve, to be easily changed to accomodate new requirements. An evolvable code base is the opposite of a brownfield. It´s code which can be easily understood (by developers with sufficient domain expertise) and then easily changed to accomodate new requirements. Ideally the costs of adding feature X to an evolvable code base is independent of when it is requested - or at least the costs should only increase linearly, not exponentially.[2] Clean Code, Agile Architecture, and even traditional Software Engineering are concerned with Evolvability. However, it seems no systematic way of achieving it has been layed out yet. TDD + SOLID help - but still… When I look at the design ability reality in teams I see much room for improvement. As stated previously, SoI - or to be more precise: Evolvability - can hardly be measured. Plus the customer rarely states an explicit expectation with regard to it. That´s why I think, special care must be taken to not neglect it. Postponing it to some large refactorings should not be an option. Rather Evolvability needs to be a core concern for every single developer day. This should not mean Evolvability is more important than any of the other requirement aspects. But neither is it less important. That´s why more effort needs to be invested into it, to bring it on par with the other aspects, which usually are much more in focus. In closing As you see, requirements are of quite different kinds. To not take that into account will make it harder to understand the customer, and to make economic decisions. Those sub-aspects of requirements are forces pulling in different directions. To improve performance might have an impact on Evolvability. To increase Production Efficiency might have an impact on security etc. No requirement aspect should go unchecked when deciding how to allocate resources. Balancing should be explicit. And it should be possible to trace back each decision to a requirement. Why is there a null-check on parameters at the start of the method? Why are there 5000 LOC in this method? Why are there interfaces on those classes? Why is this functionality running on the threadpool? Why is this function defined on that class? Why is this class depending on three other classes? These and a thousand more questions are not to mean anything should be different in a code base. But it´s important to know the reason behind all of these decisions. Because not knowing the reason possibly means waste and having decided suboptimally. And how do we ensure to balance all requirement aspects? That needs practices and transparency. Practices means doing things a certain way and not another, even though that might be possible. We´re dealing with dangerous tools here. Like a knife is a dangerous tool. Harm can be done if we use our tools in just any way at the whim of the moment. Over the centuries rules and practices have been established how to use knifes. You don´t put them in peoples´ legs just because you´re feeling like it. You hand over a knife with the handle towards the receiver. You might not even be allowed to cut round food like potatos or eggs with it. The same should be the case for dangerous tools like object-orientation, remote communication, threads etc. We need practices to use them in a way so requirements are balanced almost automatically. In addition, to be able to work on software as a team we need transparency. We need means to share our thoughts, to work jointly on mental models. So far our tools are focused on working with code. Testing frameworks, build servers, DI containers, intellisense, refactoring support… That´s all nice and well. I don´t want to miss any of that. But I think it´s not enough. We´re missing mental tools, tools for making thinking and talking about software (independently of code) easier. You might think, enough of such tools already exist like all those UML diagram types or Flow Charts. But then, isn´t it strange, hardly any team is using them to design software? Or is that just due to a lack of education? I don´t think so. It´s a matter value/weight ratio: the current mental tools are too heavy weight compared to the value they deliver. So my conclusion is, we need lightweight tools to really be able to balance requirements. Software development is complex. We need guidance not to forget important aspects. That´s like with flying an airplane. Pilots don´t just jump in and take off for their destination. Yes, there are times when they are “flying by the seats of their pants”, when they are just experts doing thing intuitively. But most of the time they are going through honed practices called checklist. See “The Checklist Manifesto” for very enlightening details on this. Maybe then I should say it like this: We need more checklists for the complex businss of software development.[3] But that´s what software development mostly is about: changing software over an unknown period of time. It needs to be corrected in order to finally provide promised operations. It needs to be enhanced to provide ever more operations and qualities. All this without knowing when it´s going to stop. Probably never - until “maintainability” hits a wall when the technical debt is too large, the brownfield too deep. Software development is not a sprint, is not a marathon, not even an ultra marathon. Because to all this there is a foreseeable end. Software development is like continuously and foreever running… ? And sometimes I dare to think that costs could even decrease over time. Think of it: With each feature a software becomes richer in functionality. So with each additional feature the chance of there being already functionality helping its implementation increases. That should lead to less costs of feature X if it´s requested later than sooner. X requested later could stand on the shoulders of previous features. Alas, reality seems to be far from this despite 20+ years of admonishing developers to think in terms of reusability.[1] ? Please don´t get me wrong: I don´t want to bog down the “art” of software development with heavyweight practices and heaps of rules to follow. The framework we need should be lightweight. It should not stand in the way of delivering value to the customer. It´s purpose is even to make that easier by helping us to focus and decreasing waste and rework. ?

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