Thursday, August 2, 2018

The Agile Architect

The technical or solution architect who has to align to an agile delivery methodology has a lot on their plate. In fact I have even recently written a post on The Agile Architect's Dilemma on Linkedin about the internal tug-of-war I am having between my agile and architectural approaches.

3 key areas they have to consider are:

Scale-ability / Scaleability:
To a certain extent this issue has become less of an issue with cloud-based services that have elastic capabilities to grown on-demand a volumes increase. However bottlenecks and latency can create problems, especially when using multiple different cloud providers or when API's are large & painfully slow. In short, not everything scales easily or linearly.

Micro-services / Microservices:
Rather than have monolithic points of integration (e.g. the above mentioned large APIs) the services that connect your different systems should be light and just based around specific functions. These micro-services allow incremental change and improvements to be made over time and better supports evolving front-end user experience requirements too.

Central data source:
Almost inevitably a digital architecture will need to store data in a single and centrally-hosted data source (e.g. a database). This repository of customer and operational data will need to be flexible enough to accommodate growing changes in storage and real-time data access requirements. However, no database (especially optimised relational database systems) can be expected to constantly change as the input and output demands of an agile development change too.

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