Welcome to FlowArchBook

Welcome. This is the beginning of my new blog about the future of event-driven integration, and the advances happening today to make that happen. The concept is described in detail in my book, Flow Architectures: The Future of Streaming and Event-Driven Integration, published with O'Reilly Media. If you have come here having read the book, thank you and I hope you find the blog equally informative. If you have yet to read the book, I encourage you to pick up a copy.

Who am I? My name is James Urquhart, and I have had a 30 year career focused on distributed systems in the enterprise. I've had product and engineering leadership positions at Sun Microsystems, Cassatt, Cisco, Enstratius, Dell, SOASTA, AWS, and Pivotal. I am currently a Principle Technologist for VMware Tanzu, working with customer leaders to understand strategies that leverage the power of the Tanzu platform. I am primarily focused on developer experience today.

I've also had a fairly successful stint as a blogger about cloud computing and the new IT economics it affords. I wrote a little blog called The Wisdom of Clouds that was picked up by CNET and later GigaOm that developed a pretty significant following.  Those early days of cloud's rapid growth were a blast, and I was very privileged to play a tiny role in helping the market to understand the opportunity the cloud model affords.

Since the blog, I've been focused on helping several companies to build businesses in the cloud, as well as advising many enterprise customers on how to best consume the cloud. However, as always, I've payed attention to what trends may indicate the next fundamental shift in computing architectures. While I believe edge computing, AI, and Dev[InsertYourFavoriteITRoleHere]Ops are all critical technologies for future systems, I'm especially attracted to the effects of event-driven architectures on our future.

There are many reasons for this. I spent time at SOASTA, where I saw the incredible power of converting batch/"big data" data processing into realtime stream processing. I saw the amazing rise of Kafka in the enterprise development conversation, and some of the amazing things people were doing with that platform. I also had a huge "aha" moment when I watched Scott Havens discuss the architectures he built at Walmart. Event-driven architectures lower the cost of availability significantly.

So, I started mapping what I called "flow systems" in a series of blog posts on Medium. These are sloppy, "first attempt" posts that I would heavily revise today. But they did raise my awareness of one thing: the interfaces and protocols we use for event-driven use cases today are largely custom built (or heavily adapted) to purpose. I asked myself "what happens when these interfaces and protocols evolve, as they almost certainly will, to the point they are standardized and ubiquitous?"

For me, it was very quickly apparent that it would revolutionize the way we integrate systems depending on realtime state changes to be effective. Everything from stock trading to healthcare to logistics to consumer gaming could benefit from interfaces that are as easy to use and readily available as HTTP links are today. It would lower the cost of integration by orders of magnitude.

It would also enable organizations to offer streams to partners, customers, or the Internet as a whole for very low cost.

So, this is what this blog will be about. Not just the technologies that drive flow, but the business opportunities and impacts that flow is now and soon will deliver. There will be Wardley mapping, Promise Theory, technology news, survey analysis, and more. I hope as you read this, you will find yourself frequently learning, critiquing, and pondering. That's the best a technology blog can hope to achieve.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, requests, or questions about this blog, flow, or event-driven systems in general on Twitter, where I am @jamesurquhart. If I can't satisfy your request, I can certainly try to help find someone who can.