SUNTONE ARCHITECTURE METHODOLOGY A 3-DIMENSIONAL ...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The explosion of the web has fundamentally changed the mission and critical success
factors facing most corporate IT shops. The “users” are now real, live customers,
and there are tens of thousands or even millions of them. More than ever before, system
problems can result directly in lost revenue and lost customers. When a system
crashes and the phone rings, it’s not an angry branch manager on the phone—it’s CNN.
Until very recently, the vast majority of IT organizations developed applications
intended for deployment exclusively to their company’s employees. Although quality
has of course always been an important consideration in corporate software
development—nobody’s happy about a buggy release—a huge class of software defects
could be tolerated reasonably well by an enterprise. Periods in excess of months would
often roll by before glacial response times might be addressed through, for instance, a
massive mainframe upgrade. Employees would be given “workarounds” to deal with
various cases of software malfunction.
Corporate IT organizations are being faced with developing applications that are
more scalable, reliable, and secure than ever before, more quickly than ever before, and
with far greater Quality of Service (QoS) than ever before. IT organizations are
confronting huge challenges in retraining staff in Web-based technologies and
implementing the process changes necessary for rapid, successive, bug-free releases to
the web. Perhaps more than any other single factor, application architecture can make
or break a dot-com system. Get the architecture wrong, and a system can ultimately
prove impossible to scale, secure, or rapidly change.
Most of the biggest names on the Internet run on Sun, and many of their systems
have been built with the help of Sun Professional Services. Over the past several years,
Sun Professional Services has amassed a tremendous amount of expertise in building
dot-com applications. We have recently synthesized this learning into a standard process,
the SunTone SM
Architecture Methodology (SunTone AM).
This paper details the key concepts in a 3-dimensional approach to creating dot-com
system architecture. It gives an overview of:
• The 3-Dimensional Framework that analyzes an architecture in terms of the
three primary design dimensions: Application Tiers, Infrastructure Layers, and
Systemic Qualities.
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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