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)

Developing a proof of concept and a prototype

Creating a prototype is probably the most fun part of being a solution architect. To choose a proven technology, a solution architect needs to develop a proof of concept (POC) in various technology stacks to analyze their fit for functional and non-functional requirements for the solution.

The idea of developing POC is to evaluate technology with a subset of critical functional implementations, which can help us to decide on a technology stack based on their capabilities. It has a short life cycle and is limited to being reviewed by experts within a team or organization. The solution design POC is when a solution architect is trying to figure out the building blocks of the solution.

After evaluating multiple platforms using POC, the solution architect may proceed with prototyping to a technology stack. A prototype is developed for demonstration purposes and given to the customer so that it can be used to secure funding. POCs and prototyping are by no means production-ready; solution architect builds have limited functionality, which can prove a challenging aspect of solution development.