Notes of an IT Architect. Eugeny Shtoltc
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init
terraform plan – out tfplan.binary
terraform show – json tfplan.binary> tfplan.json
Ansible AWX is built on top of Ansible and accepts its configuration files. The configuration files themselves are written in YAML format. Ansible converts the state of servers from the list (in the inventory file) to the one described in the configuration file. Allocation of servers in OpenStack, to some extent, can also be described in YML format. At the level in VMWare NSX describes intersegment communication in configuration files in the same YML format as others. If we talk about the library layer, then many builders install and install packages according to the configuration files, so NPM in NodeJS works with JSON configuration package.JSON, Composer in PHP also works with JSON configuration composer.JSON. Conda in Python uses the conda.YAML configuration file in YAML format, which is unambiguously converted to JSON. The exception is Maven in Java, which stores XML configuration in the pom.xml file, but, as practice shows, it is not difficult to convert pom.xml to valid JSON format using Python / NodeJS.
Solution architect
The solution architect (Solution architect, Software architect), for example, a service or system, is responsible for the detailed design of the architecture of the developed solution and its API. As part of the solution, he defines the detailed design of the solution, manages the dependencies and technical debt of the solution. His work depends on the enterprise architecture (standards), the architecture of the area in which his solution belongs, and the architecture of the platform he uses. His work is judged by:
* quality and speed of development of a detailed architecture of the service,
* reuse of developed components,
* dynamics of closing technical debt.
It connects at the earliest stages of service approval by management, so that it can influence decisions regarding this service before they are made. Moreover, these are not technical decisions, but managerial ones, for example, timeframes and budget. If these decisions are made without it, then the architect will not have to decide the choice of the stack and the type of architecture, but choose what and to what extent he can implement. The architect also oversees the implementation of architectural solutions and architectural control when accepting the service. Usually, the service architect accompanies the service itself and at the reception, protects the architecture and carries out the acceptance of the work before the customer at the acceptance tests.
A service architect is a role, while by position he can be a developer, a database engineer, and a business analyst and director. Usually, when a direction is being formed, this role is played by the forming director. Later, when individual services are known, he connects either technical specialists with high communication skills, or a business analyst with an assistant in the form of leading technical specialists of this service.
Most often, this role is assumed by a technical specialist, since it is practically impossible for non-technical specialists to build up a technical base so that they can descend from the upper layers of abstraction to the lowest and see technical problems and bottlenecks. It is the ability to switch between different levels of abstraction and work effectively at them that is the key skill of an architect. But technicians use their communication skills to attract technicians where they lack expertise, which technicians are not used to doing. This is going away because the technicians do not have enough resources to cover everything themselves. Out of habit, when they had one task in their professional area 1, they plunged into it to solve it, in the role of an architect, they cannot become specialists of all technical profiles and do everything themselves, there are not so many resources for this and from them this and not required – the team and the specialists involved in the project will implement it. The downside is that technical specialists, by virtue of the ability to delve into the problems of each component, can take this into account, but this is possible on small projects, on larger projects it is solved by involving experts and corporate architects practitioners for auditing, following standards, which is familiar to managers… Another difference is the understanding of business requirements, in particular in the financial area, timing and integrations. If technical specialists, as a rule, do not have problems with integrations, then non-technical ones, on the contrary, shifting them to others, they may find themselves with the fact that it is difficult to put everything together. On the other hand, if you have strict financial and timing requirements in custom development, the project can fail, since the customer can refuse it and still demand a forfeit, and due to weak communication skills – at the end of the project. It is also observed when an architect defends a project from directors, especially from a financial one, when the architect cannot justify the choice of the technology he likes, but expensive, when in this situation there are no obvious objective grounds, for example, Java instead of PHP, Oracle instead of MySQL, micro-services instead of a monolith, a self-written solution instead of a CMS for a small online store.
In general, the tasks of architecture development are the coordination of components, the choice of new technologies, the achievement of the desired result without alterations, and the simplification of acceptance. The main task for managers of architecture development is to accelerate implementation and accelerate the entry of new employees. For the customer – compliance of the implementation with the intention and in case of deviations during the development of the correction at the early stages, which reduces the cost of fixes. For developers – quick and easy implementation into the production process.
Ideally, architecture is immutable, but in reality this is often not the case. Basically, the cornerstone is the communication skills of the architect, who knows how to negotiate, find compromises and communicate solutions. To convey the essence of the architecture being developed, various mappings, slices are used, which display the architecture from different sides. For IT, this is the development of the architecture of various layers. The layers can be by TOGAF: business architecture, information architecture, Solution Architect, integration architecture, technical architecture). At each level, it is necessary to display system components (structural diagram) and business processes (dynamic diagram).
In general, architects can be divided into two groups: Enterprise Architect and Solution Architect. Enterprise Architect is concerned with finding and unifying technologies, while Solution Architect is developing the architecture of a specific system based on approved technologies and entering it into an application map. In small companies, in which the developed system architectures are small, the corporate architecture does not stand out – it is replaced by a component of the system architecture, namely the integration architecture.
Solution Architect must have very good soft skills (communication skills). In everyday life, the image of a person sitting and drawing squares and arrows between them can be formed. But let's imagine a situation: an architect comes to a project, sees a team developing something and hears words from a customer: the product slows down and works unstable, the situation needs to be corrected. What, where and why it slows down and crashes, and just where his project is not clear. No deep technical skills are needed now, and projects are different (an architect is not needed on a standard project) and there are already experts on it. Here the main difference is not in the level of work, in comparison with the developer, but in a fundamentally different – instead of solving the task, the formation of the task itself. If a developer takes a ready-made task from a task setting system (for example, Jira) and performs it, sometimes clarifying the conditions with the director, then the architect spends a lot on finding stakeholders, developing an optimal solution based on requirements and finding a compromise solution. If you contact the manager, team lead, developer, then none of them will tell you what the problem is. If you go to the infrastructure, then the situation is even more interesting – someone, something, somewhere deployed, but somehow it all works, and who to ask the question is also not clear. If the system is more or less complex, then there are a lot of integrations, and behind each there are separate people, who can often be found by learning only from those who happened to work with them. At the same time, it will not be possible to directly ask the integrators a question – they have their own tasks, and often they do not get in touch. This is a typical situation of a manager in a project, therefore, in this part, the software architect can be viewed as a technical manager who manages not tasks, but architectural components.
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