Anna Liu's Weblog

New Blog at UNSW

annali — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:10:50 GMT

My new work place at UNSW just provided me with a new blogging home http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/annaliu/ see you over there!

Change is Good - Change Challenges

annali — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:21:46 GMT

I've resigned from Microsoft, and will be taking up an A/Professorship in Services Engineering at the University of NSW.

To quote one of my favourite blogger - James Hamilton - 'Change is good, change challenges, change forces humility, change teaches'. I am looking forward to the new challenge and learning opportunities this change brings me!

I start at UNSW next Monday - it looks like they've already put my new contact information up!

Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Final Release

annali — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:00:48 GMT

J.D.Meier announced it - it's here - Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Final Release!

Very kind of the team to acknowledge me when I really have only made some contribution towards version 1 years ago!

Hopefully in my next job I will be able to create more IP again!

Thinking Strategically about Cloud Computing

annali — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:42:53 GMT

I'll be speaking at this Cloud Computing conference in Sydney on 3rd December.

Hope to see you there!

My Dilemma at PDC and Sydney Film Festival

annali — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:08:02 GMT

The dilemma I always have at PDC and the Sydney Film Festival is - there are so many wonderful concurrent sessions - which one do I go to?

this year - I think I've worked out a great formula that suits me - I'm sticking to the Advanced or Expert sessions. And so far, not a single dissapointment.

Short day tomorrow - but I'm really looking forward to:

8:30 - 9:45 - SQL Server Under the Hood, or, Live Services: Feedsync and Mesh Synchronization Services

10:15 - 11:30 - .NET Services: Messaging Services - Protococols, Protection, and How we Scale; or, Live Services: The Future of the Device Mesh; or, Under the Hood: Inside the Cloud Hosting Environment

noon - 1:15 - Live Services: Notifications, Awareness, and Communications; or, Designing your applications to scale; or, Windows 7: Writing your application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware

1:45 - 3:00 - .NET Services: Orchestrating Services and Business Processes Using Cloud-Based Workflow; or, Idenitity: Windows CardSpace "Geneva" Under the Hood

Luckily, for any of the sessions I miss out on seeing in person, I can watch them later here.

And for those of you that live in Australia, we're delivering a slice of the PDC action in Sydney (note - event is by invitation only - but I still have a handful of passes left - so ping me - first come first serve).

Microsoft R&D Job Opportunities

annali — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:53:52 GMT

This note came in from HR, looks interesting - hope to see some of you there!

Venue: Microsoft office, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde, 2113

Date: 3rd October, 2008

Time: 1:00pm – 3:30pm (Seated by 12:50pm)

Agenda: 12:20pm -12:50pm – Guest arrival and registrations

1:00pm – 2:20pm – Presentation by Enwei Xie (China Research and Development opportunities)

2:20pm – 2:30pm – Q&A time.

2:30pm – 2:40pm - Break

2:40pm – 3:20pm – Presentation by Andrew Le Lievre (Australian Graduate opportunities)

3:20pm – 3:30pm – Q&A time.

3:00pm – event concludes.

When you arrive at Microsoft please make your way to the main desk behind the glass doors on ground floor. There you will be registered and directed to the presentation theatre.

The event will commence at 1:00pm, however we will stop registering at 12:50pm so please ensure you do not arrive after this time.

Please, feel free to invite your friends to register for this event as well. Thank you for your interest and we look forward to seeing you on the day.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Travelling to Microsoft by bus

Visit http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.131500.com.au%2FPages%2Ftimetables.html to see a time table. The best buses to catch are:

288 - Epping Station – departs Town Hall, Wynyard - City

292 - Marsfield – departs Town Hall, Wynyard – City

294 – Epping – Departs Town Hall, Wynyard – City 140 - Manly Wharf - Macquarie University - Epping

291 - Epping - Queen Victoria Building (via North Ryde)

Ask to get off at the Pittwater Rd stop on Epping road. This is across the road from Microsoft. (See map below)

Travelling to Microsoft by car

1 Epping Road North Ryde, just past the exit from the Lane Cove tunnel but it is better to access from the Delhi Rd side.

If you coming along Delhi road from the crematorium towards Epping Road, turn off at Julius Ave. This is a double ended horse shoe road. Follow it around to the Rivett Rd round about. As you go down Rivett road the Microsoft building is on the right just before you get to the end. There are plenty of guests parking on the uphill side, alternatively on the downhill side in the underground visitor parking.

From the City, cross the Harbour Bridge onto the Gore Hill Freeway. Keep following this onto Epping Road. At the Delhi Road cross over, turn right. Turn right at the first set of traffic lights (Julius Road) and right again off Delhi Road into Riverside Park. At the first round-about, turn right into Rivett Rd. At the end of the this road Microsoft located on the right.

Street Directories

Microsoft Sydney Office

See http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.whereis.com.au for a detailed map

We look forward to seeing you there.

Regards,

HR - Recruitment

Microsoft Australia

ACS Adelaide IT Architecture Special Interest Group

annali — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:35:45 GMT

Daniel Brown dropped me a note to let me know this is happening in Adelaide:

When & Where:

· Where: Excom Education, 191 Pulteney Street, Adelaide (map)

· When: 9^th of October (09/10/2008) @ 5:30PM

Agenda:

The agenda for this month’s evenings activities are:

·5:30pm - arrive, relax and network

·5:45pm - welcome and introductions - Daniel Brown

·6pm An Overview of the Defence Architecture Framework (DODAF) - Dennis Medlow

Architecture: Systems Engineering/Architecture

Dennis will present on the background to the DODAF, motivations for its use, DODAF layers and views. He will also provide samples of DODAF representation and cross-view relationships, architecture repositories and Australian use in the Defence Industry.

Participants will gain an understanding of how the DODAF is structured, why it is being introduced and the architectural views that are defined in it.

Who should attend? Team Leaders, Architects and anyone with an interest in how systems architecture can be captured and disseminated.

· 7:00PM – Storage Architecture - Fibre vs iSCSI – Peter Chenoweth and George Stone

Architecture: Enterprise/Infrastructure Architecture

Peter will present on best practices for assessing server hosts for Fibre Channel vs iSCSI consolidated storage platforms with examples and rationale for platform selection.

George will be presenting on managing and understanding the in’s and outs of storage performance.

Who should attend? People that are interested and focused on Storage Infrastructure and Information Architecture.

· 8:00PM – Meeting Close

·8:05pm - coffee

If you plan to attend the evening’s festivities, can you please ensure to reserve your place by clicking here .

PDC 2008 Sessions Sneak Peak

annali — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:02:53 GMT

https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx

great sessions, great speakers lineup - why on earth did I give my complimentary PDC pass to Michael?

My Official Duties at TechEd Australia and New Zealand

annali — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:41:35 GMT

From the TechEd Speaker portal:

GEN003
Women in Technology Luncheon
03/09/2008 13:15-14:15
Bayside Terrace

ARC203
Understanding Software-Plus-Services: A Perspective
01/09/2008 14:15-15:30
NZ Room 2, SkyCity

ARC203
Understanding Software-Plus-Services: A Perspective
03/09/2008 10:15-11:45
Parkside Auditorium

See you there!

Cloud Computing and Middleware Market Size

annali — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:52:47 GMT

Marcus from Stefan's team blogs about this new research note from Merrill Lynch: "by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity would amount to $160bn, including $95bn in business and productivity apps (email, office, CRM, etc) and $65bn in online advertising".

Since I am someone that does not get a good sense of scale from a single absolute number, I looked up some studies on the enterprise application integration and middleware market size: from this sum up at ZDNet back in 2005: "Worldwise application integration, middleware and portal license revenue totalled $6.7 mil in 2004, a 5.8% increase from 2003 revenue of $6.3bn, according to Gartner".

mmm... interesting!

Reflecting on the last 12 months

annali — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:15:48 GMT

In the last 12 months, I did a lot more business planning and management than creating architectural IP. I learnt many new things from my team, and I thank them for their patience and support - such a previlege to work with this team of extremely talented and committed individuals: Michael, Shane, Nick, Jorke (and Scott). Thank you!

The list of achievement from the team is just amazing: ReMIX, Design led Innovation, ABC Silverlight Player, Big Brother 2008 Live Streaming, Server Launch, defining RIA... and just generally being mercurial, iconoclastic, and fab celebs.

Building Applications Differently when Cloud Services Are Around to be used

annali — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:10:33 GMT

So, "it's the end of the enterprise as we know it", there is "consumerisation of IT" that we need to figure out how to deal with. The use of some sort of cloud service is inevitable.

One thing for sure is that some sort of cloud integration services will be essential to make this new world of software plus services work across the enterprise boundaries and cloud services boundaries.

What about the hard core activity of designing and developing software components in this new world? what about the distributed computing principles that we about, the ACID transactions, the parallelism issues - would it all still work the same way when we build application spanning across the enterprise and services boundaries? To what extent does what we know about the architectural practices of doing enterprise application integration apply to this new world?

There is so much work to be done here, by the architects, by the researchers, by the practitioners looking at early adoptions... I see Pat Helland is already talking about how the way we build applications need to change in his wonderful presentation on "The Irresistable Forces Meet the Moveable Objects" presentation - love your work Pat!

From Impedences to Enterprise Adoption of Cloud Services to Doing Things differently in the Brave New World

annali — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:58:33 GMT

Stacey blogged about the 10 Reasons Enterprise Aren't Ready to Trust the Cloud. Immediately, the conservative enterprise architect in me couldn't have agreed more.

I then picked the brains of my esteemed architect colleagues Nigel and Greg, and it sounds like they're also making the same observation from the community of Enterprise Architects that they engage with in Sydney and in Melbourne, Nigel even wrote me this great summary:

"From the Software plus Service architect councils late last year 1,2,8.9.10 all touched on in various forms in the sessions. In addition:

Enterprise:

How do we integrate with our internal systems. Particularly auth and single-sign on. Perception was that security integration is very difficult

How do we ensure compliance/privacy requirements are met.

Public Sector:

Nope. Never going to cloud-enable citizen data – data custodianship and geo-location issues present major issues (i.e. where are the data centres?)

National security: somewhat related to the above – never going to convince PS agencies to expose sensitive info to outsiders.

But.. .internal public cloud configs (i.e. WOG shared services) probably very likely.

And... hybrid models might be acceptable – i.e. non-sensitive data externalised, sensitive internalised."

Then, I remembered my blog entry a while back "It's the End of the Enterprise as We Know It", and I can't help but think that - cloud computing and services isn't really about just solving our existing enterprise IT challenges, it is not an evolution, but it is the beginning of a revolution, and this time, the revolution will not necessarily be led by the IT department, but by the individual workers/contractors that as a collective act both as the IT service provider as well as the consumer. 'Consumerisation of IT' is only the beginning.

The first start up with the not yet thought of business model, and the not yet thought of user experience, and the not yet thought of relationships enablement will win this brave new world of software plus services.

New FY Resolution

annali — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:55:28 GMT

ok, here's to FY09, wish me luck - my new financial year resolution is to once again blog regularly, documenting my learnings on this journey...

Celebrating International Women's Day

annali — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:04:14 GMT

FITT is running the IWD luncheon again - but sadly we missed out - as it was a booked out event way in advance - I think we'll need to lobby for a bigger venue in the future...

in any case, a bunch of us got together for lunch today to celebrate - Bronwen even flew in from Brisbane! - and Spider reminded us to wear suffragettes colours - purple/green/white, and sent us these links: History of International Womens Day, Women for Women international, to remind us what International Women Day stood for exactly 100 years ago.

Very happy to see my IWD 2008 Banner flying proudly in Martin Place today in glorious purple and green.