SATURN 2018 Presentations

• This collection was created for a conference series or symposium and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.

• In 2018, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference celebrated its 14th year. As the premier software architecture conference for senior engineers, SATURN 2018 offered keynotes and sessions on both essential skills and cutting-edge methods for software architects. Browse slide presentations from SATURN 2018 below.

  • Browse videos of the presentations
  • Visit the conference website

• Keynote: The Whys and Hows of Evolutionary Architecture May 2018 Author(s): Rebecca Parsons (ThoughtWorks) This presentation focuses on how fitness functions drive architecture in the right direction and techniques like refactoring databases and continuous delivery.
• Keynote: Uncoupling May 2018 Author(s): Michael Nygard (Cognitect, Inc.) Coupling seems to be the root of all ills. This talk reminds us, in the industry from which we borrowed the term, "coupling" was not a dirty word. It meant something ingenious.
• A Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)-Based ERP May 2018 Author(s): Charles Chow (Deloitte Consulting) This presentation considers whether function-as-a-service–based enterprise resource planning systems can become a reality as serverless architecture matures.
• A Journey to the Center of the Clouds May 2018 Author(s): Jørn Ølmheim (Statoil ASA) This talk shares Statoil's journey toward adoption of modern IT technologies and architecture patterns like cloud computing, machine learning, and microservices.
• A Radio Astronomer and an Architect Walk into a Bar... May 2018 Author(s): John Klein This talk describes the problem of designing the architecture for a radio telescope that will process data equivalent to 10 times the global internet traffic.
• Architectural Tradeoffs in Learning-Based Software May 2018 Author(s): Pooyan Jamshidi (Carnegie Mellon University) This presentation shows how architectural tradeoffs in learning-based software stacks are made via a case study of design space exploration in deep neural networks.
• Architecture Principles for Data Privacy of Cloud-Based Medical-Device Services May 2018 Author(s): Andrzej Knafel (Roche Diagnostics International, Ltd.) This talk describes architecture principles for addressing GDPR data privacy requirements sufficiently enough to operate software products in most global regions.
• Architectural Hoisting: Or How I Learned to Stop Writing Breaking Code and Love the Architecture May 2018 Author(s): Joe Runde (IBM), Michael Keeling (IBM Watson Group), Charles Gala (IBM Watson) This talk describes how an IBM Watson team used architectural hoisting to enforce design decisions in the code and avoid accidental architectural violations.
• A Token Walks into a SPA... May 2018 Author(s): Ado Kukic (Auth0) Between Angular, React, and Vue, it can be hard not to build single-page applications (SPAs). This presentation shows how to create secure SPAs.
• Azure Table Storage: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly May 2018 Author(s): Sirar Salih (Making Waves) Everyone is talking about Azure Table storage, the brand new NoSQL data service in the cloud. This presentation explains its advantages and disadvantages.
• Betting on Evolutionary Architecture: A Note on Software Architecture as Code May 2018 Author(s): James Lewis (Thoughtworks) This talk covers prerequisites that allow small bets on architecture and explores the strange world of evolutionary design that this technique makes possible.
• Blockchain Is the Answer. What Was the Question Again? May 2018 Author(s): Harald Wesenberg (Statoil ASA) This presentation shares a checklist of topics to distinguish between pure vaporware and well-thought-through blockchain initiatives that can succeed.
• Changing the World a Service at a Time: A Tale of the Transition of a Large-Scale Data Processing System to an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS Paradigm May 2018 Author(s): Gerry Tucker (Raytheon) This talk narrates the tale of revolutionizing a domain by migrating from monolithic, single-contract systems to an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS/Application ecosystem.
• Cloud-Native Patterns/Anti-Patterns and How to Find Them in Enterprise Systems May 2018 Author(s): Vishal Prabhu (Deloitte Consulting LLP), Sean Gilbert (Deloitte Consulting LLP), Siva Muthu (Deloitte Consulting) This talk covers cloud-native patterns and anti-patterns for assessing cloud suitability of .NET and Java applications and demonstrates an anti-pattern detection tool.
• Continuous Delivery with Containers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly May 2018 Author(s): Daniel Bryant (Independent Consultant) This talk covers the essential steps of creating an effective continuous-delivery pipeline for developing and deploying containerized applications.
• Enterprise IT: Architecture to the Rescue May 2018 Author(s): Jørn Ølmheim (Statoil ASA) This talk shows how Statoil has set up a company-wide network of architects, both on the business side and on the IT side, who work together.
• Evaluation of Legacy Software Architecture May 2018 Author(s): Michael Turner (Visteon Corporation) In the automotive industry, safety and security are paramount. This presentation focuses on experiences evaluating a mature automotive software architecture.
• FamilySearch’s Family Tree Web Application: Replacing Relational Database Technology and Transitioning to Cloud-Hosted Computing May 2018 Author(s): Randy A. Ynchausti (LDS Church) This talk describes FamilySearch's approach to transitioning from proprietary relational databases to open source relational and NoSQL databases in the cloud.
• Feed Your Inner Data Scientist: JavaScript Tools for Data Visualization and Filtering May 2018 Author(s): Doug Mair (Improving Enterprises) Visualizing data in JavaScript is daunting. This talk describes three open source JavaScript libraries that help developers create compelling visualizations.
• Fixing Under Fire May 2018 Author(s): Michael Lipschultz (IBM Watson), Aiton Goldman (IBM Watson) This talk covers how to design a highly available, cloud-based, fine-grained SOA system to improve visibility, diagnose-ability, and developer happiness.
• From Mainframes to Microservices: Lessons Learned in Modernizing High-Demand Applications May 2018 Author(s): Lori Olson (Deloitte Consulting LLP) This presentation describes Deloitte's experiences in the government and health-care industries, successfully using microservices to replace mainframe capabilities.
• Green Cloud: Sustainable Open Source Cloud Architecture on ARM64 May 2018 Author(s): Kurt Stam (Red Hat) This talk explains how to build containers for different chip architectures for virtually no extra cost using your existing CI infrastructure with green clouds.
• Handling Personal Information in LinkedIn's Content Ingestion System May 2018 Author(s): David Max (LinkedIn) This talk explores the technological issues involved with removing PII when members close their accounts in the context of LinkedIn's content ingestion system.
• How Do Software Architects Find the Way to User Experience? With Google Maps! May 2018 Author(s): Matthias Naab ((Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering)), Marcus Trapp (Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering) This presentation uses Google Maps to illustrate the mutual impact of architecture and excellent UX and the relationship between UX designers and software architects.
• How to Measure Anything! ... Or Actually Just Quality Attributes May 2018 Author(s): Sebastian von Conrad (Envato) Many quality attributes can be hard to measure. This talk applies lessons from Hubbard's How to Measure Anything to quantify even the trickiest QAs.
• How to "Talk" to Your Software: Alexa, Google, Watson, and Cortana, a Side-by-Side Comparison of Cloud Speech Recognition APIs May 2018 Author(s): Arila Barnes (GE Digital) With the introduction of products like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Echo, speech recognition is now part of daily life. This presentation shows how to pick the right service.
• Industrial Experiences with Automated Software Architecture Measurement May 2018 Author(s): Yuanfang Cai (Drexel University), Rick Kazman (University of Hawaii) This talk presents the experience of creating, evolving, and validating an automated software architecture measurement system in two large multinational corporations.
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform May 2018 Author(s): Arturo Pie (Nulogy) Writing infrastructure as code is a considerable initial investment. This presentation shows how Terraform reduces the cost of implementing and maintaining IaC.
• Manage Your Technical Debt Portfolio May 2018 Author(s): Michael Keeling (IBM Watson Group), Michael Lipschultz (IBM Watson) The road to production is lined with decisions made under uncertainty. This presentation explains how great teams learn to use technical debt to their advantage.
• Managing Data Consistency in a Microservice Architecture Using Sagas May 2018 Author(s): Chris Richardson (Eventuate, Inc.) Microservice architecture must be loosely coupled and cannot share database tables. This talk describes how to use sagas to develop business logic in a microservices application.
• Marvin AI: An Open Source Platform to Deploy and Manage Machine Learning Models May 2018 Author(s): Daniel Takabayashi (B2W Digital), Jeremy Elster (B2W Digital) Marvin AI is an open source project that helps data science teams deliver complex solutions with a high-scale, low-latency, language-agnostic, standardized architecture.
• Migrating from Oracle to Espresso May 2018 Author(s): David Max (LinkedIn) This talk describes how LinkedIn migrated its content ingestion platform, Babylonia, from Oracle to Espresso without affecting clients.
• No Coding Required: Building a Kubernetes Native IPaaS May 2018 Author(s): Kurt Stam (Red Hat) This talk describes lessons learned and architectural decisions made while creating an integration-platform-as-a-service application based on Kubernetes.
• Orchestrating AWS Lambda with Step Functions May 2018 Author(s): Matt Williams (Datadog) Step Functions allow you to easily orchestrate Lambdas. This presentation demonstrates with Step Functions, Lambda, and Raspberry Pi.
• Refactoring to Functional Architecture Patterns May 2018 Author(s): George Fairbanks (Google) This talk describes a Google experience of using both functional and object-oriented programming, which resulted in an architecture flavored by functional ideas.
• Rest.li: RESTful Service Architecture at Scale with Asynchronous/Non-blocking IO May 2018 Author(s): Min Chen (LinkedIn) This presentation describes how the open-source rest.li framework can transform your legacy monolithic application into modern microservice architecture.
• Scaling Services with an In-Memory Distributed Caches May 2018 Author(s): Chirag Aggarwal (Go-Jek Engineering), Divya Nagar (Go-Jek Engineering) This talk describes the problems of scaling a high-throughput API at GO-JEK and how using the constructs of Golang to build a distributed in-memory cache solved them.
• Shorten Your Architectural Feedback Loop May 2018 Author(s): Eltjo Poort (CGI) Short feedback loops make for better architectures and higher agility. This presentation shares CGI's experiences shortening the architectural feedback loop.
• Smart Decisions Game: Machine Learning for Architects May 2018 Author(s): Rick Kazman (University of Hawaii), Serhiy Haziyev (SoftServe, Inc.), Iurii Milovanov (SoftServe, Inc.) Machine learning has gained traction in research and industry over the past few years. This talk teaches designing architectures for ML systems via an interactive game.
• The Ethical Software Architect May 2018 Author(s): Eltjo Poort (CGI), Michael Keeling (IBM Watson Group) This talk covers tools to explore ethical scenarios that any software architect can run into and considers how to improve ourselves as ethical architects.
• Tiered Blockchain Mechanisms for High-Integrity Outcomes May 2018 Author(s): Ryan Luckay (Deloitte Consulting LLP) This presentation explains how a blockchain aggregation system can sidestep current limitations in scale and create complex event-driven architectures.
• Whom to Marry? Agile Experiments for Tough Architecture Decisions May 2018 Author(s): Thijmen de Gooijer (ABB Corporate Research), Elisabeth Blom (Kommuninvest) Integration technology choices are difficult to change and painful to get wrong. This talk describes Kommuninvest's approach to a long-lasting architectural decision.