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.

Ecommerce sites please prep for Christmas

I have a magical and imaginary crystal ball, so if you run a retail eCommerce site in the Western world ..... let me tell you what I see in your short term future....

....An increase in visitor traffic over the next 6 weeks, culminating in a peak around Christmas time.

So now I've told you what's going to happen, what are you going to do about it? Well, if you're like so many other sites I see, you'll do bugger all about it. Then, should your site start to go slow (or even stop) in the run up to your busiest online trading period ever, you'll remember this blog post. And by then, there will be almost nothing you can do about it.

But right now, with 6 weeks to go, there is still time (just) to do something about it. How much actually depends on a number of factors, including how stable and scalable your eCommerce platform and code actually are. Another will depend upon the flexibility you have with your hosting company. Other factors are much harder to describe without going into a lot of scenarios and assumptions, but suffice to say there's always something you can do to improve the performance of a site, given enough lead time and the right expertise.
Note: If you don't know who who to contact, please drop me a line

In short, dear website owner or manger, please make sure you're ready for what is expected to be the largest eCommerce Christmas ever.