Book Image

Solutions Architect's Handbook

By : Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav
Book Image

Solutions Architect's Handbook

By: Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav

Overview of this book

Becoming a solutions architect gives you the flexibility to work with cutting-edge technologies and define product strategies. This handbook takes you through the essential concepts, design principles and patterns, architectural considerations, and all the latest technology that you need to know to become a successful solutions architect. This book starts with a quick introduction to the fundamentals of solution architecture design principles and attributes that will assist you in understanding how solution architecture benefits software projects across enterprises. You'll learn what a cloud migration and application modernization framework looks like, and will use microservices, event-driven, cache-based, and serverless patterns to design robust architectures. You'll then explore the main pillars of architecture design, including performance, scalability, cost optimization, security, operational excellence, and DevOps. Additionally, you'll also learn advanced concepts relating to big data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Finally, you'll get to grips with the documentation of architecture design and the soft skills that are necessary to become a better solutions architect. By the end of this book, you'll have learned techniques to create an efficient architecture design that meets your business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Solution Architects in an Organization

A solution architect understands the needs and goals of an organization. Often, solution architects work for the organization as part of a team. All stakeholders, processes, teams, and organization management affect solution architect roles and their work. In this chapter, you will learn and understand the solution architect role and how solution architects fit within the organization. Following that, you will learn about the various types of solution architect and how they coexist in an organization. You may need a generalist solution architect and other specialist solution architects, depending on your project's complexity.

This chapter will provide details on the solution architect's responsibility and how it can impact an organization's success. A solution architect wears multiple hats and business executives heavily depend on their experience and decision-making to understand their technical vision.

The solution-and-software development methodology has evolved over the last few decades, from waterfall to agile, which a solution architect needs to adopt. This chapter will provide details about the Agile methodology and the iterative approach that a solution architect should take for the continuous improvement of solution delivery. Overall, agile thinking is very important for a solution architect.

In addition to solution design, solution architects need to handle various constraints to evaluate risk and plan risk mitigation. Also, quality management plays a significant role, which shouldn't be overlooked. The solution architect plays an essential role throughout the solution's life cycle (from requirement collection, solution design, and solution implementation to testing and launch).

A solution architect needs to engage regularly post-launch to ensure the scalability, high availability, and maintainability of the solution. For broader consumer products, the solution architect also needs to work with the sales team as a technology evangelist of the product through content publishing and public speaking in various forums.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • Types of solution architect role
  • Solution architect responsibilities
  • Solution architects in an agile organization