IASA Conference 2009 

IASA Conference 2009

The International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is the premier association focused on the architecture profession through the advancement of best practices and education while delivering programs and services to IT architects of all levels around the world. 

Established in 2002, IASA is an international non-profit business association dedicated to the advancement and sharing of issues related to software architecture in the enterprise, product, education and government sectors. 

The association is committed to improving the quality of the IT architecture industry by developing and delivering standards, education programs and developing accreditation programs and services that optimize the development of architecture profession.  IASA membership consists of approximately 6,000 members  located in over 50 countries.

IASA has been in Malaysia for more than 5 years and this is my first time (representing Raingate System Sdn Bhd) joining their 2 days conference, hosted at Legend Hotel Kuala Lumpur.

Started with a Star Trek theme intro, the president & deputy president of IASA Malaysia lead the audience into the important of IT Architecture. Then, Mr Eric from SAP pointed out the industry is moving towards business intelligence direction. Next, Professor Dr. Terry Halpin from INITI, who also founded ORM.net, highlighted the interesting use of fact orientation and natural language in model-driven engineering.
 

In the afternoon, talks split into 3 tracks. My interest is in Cloud computing as I am aware of the needs to allow my web application to scale dynamically according to its growth.

Mr Hoong Fai from Microsoft started the talk in the topic of "The changing landscape of services architecture and how S+S, SOA and cloud computing are part of the evolution". Being portrayed as the BIG THING of the decade, cloud computing are similar to grid computing and utility computing and yet very different. Its main characteristic is to allow users to consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Virtualization are the main underlying technology that being used.

Software running on cloud computing environment is called cloudware. It required changes on software architecture to harvest the greatest benefits from the distribution nature of cloud computing. To achieve the goal, developer and architecture has to move away from ACID to BASE methodology. To ease the process, Microsoft provides the best-of-breed solution through AZURE.com.

Security as the top issue was covered by Mr Sudev Bangah (from IDC) on day 2. While both client and hacker are aware of this emerging technology, its adoption rate are highly depends on the vendors. To solve this chicken and egg problem, vendor must take action to safeguard their services, guided by the trends of Encryption (HTTPS), audibility and certification (ISO27001).

Throughout this conference, others interesting topics about cloud computer are presented. For example, the use of RFID in cloud computing, how the industry leader utilized the technology and the rise of 'consumerization' to lead IT industry further into direction define by consumer.