Architecture 101 for Mobile Backend Developers on Azure

That is a pretty long title, right? :) Yesterday we had a meetup to celebrate the third anniversary of our local Xamarin User Group. This time I wanted to present something different. Here are the problems I felt like I should give a shot to tackle on.

New architecture trends immerge, sometimes old ones resurface and sessions are presented about these concepts. Sometimes those are sessions about the architectural approach, sometimes more practical including hands-on demos with a set of selected tools/frameworks. The issue I see is that most of the time the audience’s perception is that whatever is on stage is the new, shiny thing, and whatever has been left in the past needs to stay in the past. Unfortunately, that’s never the case. I wish it was. It is critical to understand where that new thing fits into the big picture of the options and choices we have. One of my goals for this session was to show a bigger picture and create confusion, hopefully pushing the listener into thinking that there is a “thoughtful selection” that needs to be done, and they shouldn’t simply highlighting what the latest is. Trust me, It is not always the greatest :)

While at it, I wanted to touch into the topic of data storage options as well. The reasons are pretty much the same as the one I described in the previous paragraph. Giving the big picture, overwhelming the listener :) and pushing them into a direction where they feel like it is up to them and they can’t just choose the latest, because it is merely the newest.

Finally, I wanted to show how these architectures can land in the world of Azure. What services can be used to implement the selected architecture and how? What makes great cloud applications? To cover all these topics I wanted to limit the scope a little bit. That’s why the title refers to “mobile back-end developers” :)

That is all I wanted to accomplish in the above deck. The feedback I received after the session made me very happy :) I really liked when an attendee came over and suggested me to include “Actor Model into the soup.” He definitely got the point about the deck :) It looks like the session accomplished precisely what I wanted it to achieve. Though, I definitely need to give a break and divide this 90-minute talk into separated presentations :) or simply shorten it.

Thanks everyone for being there with us. See you on the next one ;)