During an internal conference – Envision – this week I have attended several architecture sessions about Service Oriented Architecture, Architectural patterns and so forth. Most of them have been interesting, but two have been a far-reaching experience for me. The sessions I am talking about are Metropolis from Pat Helland (haven’t found a blog - if there is one, I’d be interested in) and an architectural site meeting hosted by Michael Platt and Keith Short. Those sessions started me thinking about how my understanding of architecture has changed in the past and currently is changing at all.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
My first thoughts of “architecture” were completely different – I thought about things like class design, design patterns or logical database design as primary tasks of an architect. And – quite amazing – this understanding completely changed during the last one and a half year. I recognized that “being an architect” has much more facings than I originally thought – class design or database design are only a couple of trees within a large forest. The forest consists of different applications within the company, across companies; it includes the network infrastructure and its architecture and so on and so forth. But in terms of so many different layers of architecture – within applications, between applications, mapping to infrastructure and so forth – the forest view is much larger than I even can imagine now…