Create robust, scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant solutions by learning different aspects of solution architecture and next-generation architecture design in the cloud environment.

Solutions Architect’s Handbook, 2nd Edition

Solutions Architect's Handbook - Second Edition

Preface

This book will be your first step in the solution architecture world, acting as a comprehensive guide to learn all about solution architecture, and allowing you to become a professional solution architect. In this chapter, we will explore the meaning of solution architecture, and how it is the foundation of solution development in an organization. A robust solution architecture design helps successful software application development in a complex organization, covering all aspects, from IT infrastructure, application security, and reliability, to operational aspects in production.

The Meaning of Solution Architecture

A solution architect understands the needs and goals of an organization as part of a team—all stakeholders, processes, teams, and the organization's management affect solution architect roles and their work. In this chapter, you will learn and understand the role of the solution architect and how they fit into the organization. Following that, you will learn about the various types of solution architects, and how they coexist within an organization. An organization may need a generalist solution architect, along with other specialist solution architects that are required based on a project's complexity.

Solution Architects in an Organization

The solution architecture needs to consider multiple attributes and design applications. Solution design may have a broad impact across numerous projects in an organization, which demands a careful evaluation of the various properties of the architecture while also striking a balance between them. This chapter will provide a holistic understanding of each attribute, and how they are interrelated and coexist in solution design.

Attributes of the Solution Architecture

In the previous chapter, you learned about the attributes of solution architecture. Those attributes are essential properties that a solution architect needs to keep in mind while creating a solution design. In this chapter, you will learn about the principles of solution architecture design, which incorporate various attributes during solution design.

Principles of Solution Architecture Design

Today's organizations need to be more agile to respond to customer demands, which requires the ability to quickly scale up to millions of customers and scale down as needed without impacting the budget. Organizations need to continuously acquire new customers, delighting them while working in a fiercely competitive environment. Cloud migration could be the answer for achieving agility and speed. The cloud enables frequent application releases and reduces costs by applying automation and data center consolidation.

Cloud Migration and Hybrid Cloud Architecture Design

Have you ever wondered how large enterprises design scalable systems? Before starting application development, solution architects worked across organizations and weighed multiple options to develop architecture design to handle the business need. There are multiple ways to design a solution. A solution architect needs to take the right approach based on user requirements along with the architecture constraints of cost, performance, scalability, and availability. In this chapter, you will learn about various solution architecture patterns along with reference architectures and how to apply them in real-world scenarios.

Solution Architecture Design Patterns

In this era of fast internet, users expect very high-performance applications. There have been experiments that show that every second of application load delay causes a significant loss in an organization's revenue. Therefore, the application's performance is one of the most critical attributes of solution design that can impact your product adoption growth.

Performance Considerations

Security is always at the center of architecture design. Many large enterprises suffer financial losses due to security breaches when their customer data gets leaked. Organizations can therefore not only lose customer trust but also the entire business. There are many industry-standard compliances and regulations out there to make sure your application is secure and protects customer-sensitive data. In the previous chapter, you learned about various performance-improvement aspects and technology choices for your architecture. In this chapter, you will gain an understanding of best practices to secure your application and make sure it is compliant with industry-standard regulations.

Security Considerations

Application reliability is one of the essential aspects of architecture design. A reliable application helps to win customer trust by making it available whenever the customer needs it. As all kinds of businesses are now online, high availability has become one of the mandatory criteria for online applications. Users want to browse your application anytime and complete tasks such as shopping and banking at their convenience. Reliability is one of the essential recipes for any business to be successful.

Architectural Reliability Considerations

Application maintainability is one of the main aspects that a solution architect should consider during architectural design. Every new project starts with lots of planning and resources at the beginning. Teams spend the initial months creating and launching your application. After the production launch, the application needs several things to be taken care of to keep operating. You need to continually monitor your application to find and resolve any issues on a day-to-day basis.

Operational Excellence Considerations

One of the primary goals of any business is to increase profitability while serving its customers. Cost is the key parameter of discussion when a project is initiated. Having an application upgrade and adding new product features heavily depends upon the amount of funding available. The product's cost is everyone's responsibility and needs to be considered in every phase of the product life cycle (from planning to post-production). This chapter will help you understand the best practices for optimizing costs for your IT solutions and operations.

Cost Considerations

In traditional environments, the development team and the IT operations team work in silos. The development team gathers requirements from business owners and develops the applications. System administrators are solely responsible for operations and for meeting uptime requirements. These teams generally do not have any direct communication during the development life cycle, and each team rarely understands the processes and needs of the other team.

DevOps and Solution Architecture Framework

In the internet and digitization era, data is being generated everywhere with high velocity and volume. Getting insight from these huge amounts of data at a fast pace is challenging. We need to innovate continuously to ingest, store, and process this data to derive business outcomes.

Data Engineering for Solution Architecture

In the previous chapter, you learned about ingesting and processing big data and getting insights to understand your business. In the traditional way of running a business, the organization's decision-maker looks at past data and uses their experience to plot the future course of company direction. It's not just about setting up the business vision but also improving the end-user experience by predicting their needs and delighting them or automating day-to-day decision-making activities such as loan approval.

Machine Learning Architecture

As internet connectivity is increasing, there is an increasing number of small devices everywhere with small memory and compute capacities. These sensors connect various physical entities, such as your home alarm, thermal sensors, and car, and the data from millions of these connected devices needs to be collected and analyzed. For example, weather data collected from multiple sensors can be utilized to forecast weather for wind energy and farming. There are billions of connected devices in homes, factories, oil wells, hospitals, cars, and thousands of other places that are fueling digital transformation, generating huge volumes of data and growing exponentially.

The Internet of Things Architecture

Quantum technologies are a rapidly growing and interdisciplinary field of science and engineering. Until now, we've depended upon supercomputers to solve most problems, but quantum computing ( QC ) accelerates complex calculations exponentially, resulting in a very powerful supercomputer. As per quantum physics, a quantum is the smallest unit of any physical property and refers to the properties of atomic particles, such as electrons, neutrinos, and photons. QC can solve computational problems beyond classical computers' reach by utilizing the laws of quantum mechanics to process information in new ways.

Quantum Computing

Today's organizations are operating in a challenging environment. The pace of change is unprecedented. Regulators and institutions are imposing new reporting and security requirements, new technologies are disrupting consumers' expectations and perceptions, and the ecosystem is constantly evolving as new players enter the market. As a result, organizations are redefining their business models to provide the customer focus, agility, and technology they need to attract talent, be competitive, and grow.

Rearchitecting Legacy Systems

In previous chapters, you learned about various aspects of solution architecture design and optimization. As the solution architect works on the design, it is essential to have consistent communication with other stakeholders for successful application delivery. The solution architect needs to communicate a solution design to all technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Solution Architecture Document

In the previous chapters, you learned how a solution architect needs to accommodate all stakeholders' needs. Even if the solution architect's role is technical, they need to work across the organization, from senior management to the development team. To be a successful solution architect, soft skills are essential and critical factors.

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