Yesterday evening witnessed one of the best performances of Dream Theater. If I had to summarize the show in one word it would be amazing. Now back to reality, LEAP master class 3 is coming up next Thursday I there is allot of reading to be done for preparation. The first session was focused on the (de)coupling of information systems something Microsoft calls “Connected Systems”, which is in there view the practical realization and implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), see previous post. The second session was about provisioning enterprise information and services to the end user. Now the focus is on building the infrastructure needed to support all of this. This article presents a solid overview of the essence and importance of infrastructure architecture. Micosoft view of infrastructure architecture is to realize a platform that allows controllability, combined with a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and high level of security. This is what Microsoft describes as a “secure and well managed infrastructure”, as shortly introduced here.
Other reading material is a high level overview of the IO model is presented in the following document. Dynamic Systems Initiative reading (this is a long term initiative that strives to bring together both the development and operations side of the application life cycle) is found here. Microsoft offers a lot of guidance concerning server architecture by its Windows Server System Reference Architecture. Documentation around this can be found on their website. An overview of the main areas that are important within infrastructure design are listed in the WSSRA Architecture overview.
And if that is not enough there is more reading material to prepare for this masterclass: Microsoft Operation Framework and System Center. So as you can see there is a lot of material on infrastructure. It also shows that Microsoft is doing a good job in documenation on there products and solutions and in providing in guidance.
Technorati: 
LEAP 2008 
WSSRA 
DSI 
MOF 
System Center
