Preface
The Solutions Architect's Handbook guides readers to create robust, scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant solutions by learning different aspects of solution architecture and next-generation architecture design in the cloud environment. This book will start by detailing solution architecture and how it fits in an agile enterprise environment. It will further take the reader through the journey of solution architecture design by providing detailed knowledge of design pillars, advanced design patterns, anti-patterns, and cloud-native aspects of modern software design. The reader will further dive deep into solution design performance optimization, security, compliance, reliability, cost optimization, and operational excellence. This book provides an in-depth understanding of the automation of security, infrastructure, DevOps, disaster recovery, and documentation of solution architecture. This book also provides a good understanding of future-proof architecture design with data engineering, machine learning, IoT, and quantum computing. As a bonus, this book also offers a soft-skill aspect of solution architect and continuous learning techniques.
Who this book is for?
This book is for software developers, system engineers, DevOps engineers, architects, and team leaders working in the IT industry who aspire to become solution architects and to design secure, reliable, highly performant, and cost-effective architectures.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Meaning of Solution Architecture, defines what solution architecture is and its importance. It explains various benefits of having a solution architecture in place and talks about architecting on the public cloud.
Chapter 2, Solution Architects in an Organization, discusses the different types of solution architect roles and how they fit in the organizational structure. It explores the various responsibilities of the solution architect in detail. It further explains the solution architect role fit in an agile organization along with agile processes.
Chapter 3, Attributes of the Solution Architecture, throws light on various attributes of solution architecture, such as scalability, resiliency, disaster recovery, accessibility, usability, security, and cost. It explains the co-existence and utilization of these architectural attributes to create an efficient solution design.
Chapter 4, Principles of Solution Architecture Design, talks about architecture principles to create scalable, resilient, and high-performance architecture. It explains efficient architecture design by applying security measures, overcoming constraints, and applying changes along with testing and automation approaches. It explores architecture principles to use service-oriented architecture and a data-driven approach.
Chapter 5, Cloud Migration and Hybrid Cloud Architecture Design, explains the benefits of the cloud and approaches to designing cloud-native architecture. It gives an understanding of different cloud migration strategies and migration steps. It talks about hybrid cloud design and explores popular public cloud providers.
Chapter 6, Solution Architecture Design Patterns, explores various architecture design patterns such as layered, microservice, event-driven, queue-based, serverless, cache-based, and service-oriented patterns, with examples. It demonstrates the applicability of solution architecture attributes and principles to design the best architecture as per business requirements.
Chapter 7, Performance Considerations, provides an understanding of essential attributes of application performance improvement such as latency, throughput, and concurrency. It explains various technology choices to improve performance at the multiple layers of architecture such as compute, storage, database, and networking, along with performance monitoring.
Chapter 8, Security Considerations, talks about various design principles applicable to securing your workload. Security needs to be applied at every layer and every component of architecture, and this chapter helps you to get an understanding of the right selection of technology to ensure your architecture is secure at every layer. It explores industry compliance applicable to architecture design as needed and explains security in the cloud with a shared responsibility model.
Chapter 9, Architectural Reliability Considerations, talks about design principles to make your architecture reliable. It explores various disaster recovery techniques to ensure high application availability and data replication methods for business process continuation. It explains best practices and the role of the cloud in applications to achieve reliability.
Chapter 10, Operational Excellence Considerations, talks about various processes and methods to achieve operational excellence for applications. It explains best practices and technology selections to apply throughout application design, implementation, and post-production to improve application operability. It also explores operational excellence for cloud workloads.
Chapter 11, Cost Considerations, talks about various techniques to optimize cost without risking business agility and outcomes. It explains multiple methods to monitor costs and apply governance for cost control. It helps you to understand cost optimization using the cloud.
Chapter 12, DevOps and Solution Architecture Framework, explains the importance of DevOps in application deployment, testing, and security. It explores DevSecOps and its role in the application's continuous deployment and delivery pipeline. It also talks about DevOps and best practices and different tools and techniques to implement them.
Chapter 13, Data Engineering for Solution Architecture, talks about how to design big data and analytics architecture. It explains steps to create a big data pipeline, including data ingestion, storage, processing, and visualization. It helps you to understand different big data architecture patterns, such as data lakes, data meshes, and lakehouses, with data architecture best practice.
Chapter 14, Machine Learning Architecture, explores details about machine learning and model evaluation techniques, and provides an overview of various machine learning algorithms. It talks about machine learning architecture patterns with reference architectures on a cloud platform. The chapter further explains the concept of MLOps with best practices and deep learning technologies.
Chapter 15, The Internet of Things Architecture, explains the IoT and various components of IoT architecture. It talks about industrial IoT and the digital twin concept along with giving insight into analytics for IoT data and IoT device management at scale.
Chapter 16, Quantum Computing, explains the working of quantum computers with real-life use cases. It provides details on building blocks of quantum computing and how quantum computers work in a very simplified manner. It talks about quantum gates, quantum circuits, and various types of quantum computing along with their availability on cloud platforms.
Chapter 17, Rearchitecting Legacy Systems, talks about various challenges and modernization drivers for legacy systems. It explains strategies and techniques for modernizing legacy systems as the public cloud is becoming a go-to strategy for many organizations. The chapter explores the cloud migration of legacy systems along with details on mainframe migration and modernization.
Chapter 18, Solution Architecture Document, talks about the solution architecture document with its structure and various details that need to be accommodated for in the documentation. It explores various IT procurement documentation such as RFP, RFI, and RFQ, where solution architects participate in providing feedback.
Chapter 19, Learning Soft Skills to Become a Better Solution Architect, talks about various soft skills required for a solution architect to be successful in the role. It helps you to understand methods to acquire strategic skills such as pre-sales and executive communication and develop design thinking and personal leadership skills such as thinking big and ownership. It also explores techniques to establish yourself as a leader and continue improving your skillset.
To get the most out of this book
Prior experience of software architecture design will be helpful to follow this book. It's good to have a basic understanding of any popular public cloud provider such as AWS. However, there are no specific prerequisites to understand this book. All the examples and relevant instructions are provided in the various chapters. This book takes you through the deep concept of solution architecture design and does not require knowledge of any particular programming language, framework, or tool.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781801816618_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example; "IoT platforms need to support SigV4, X.509 and custom authentication, while providing fine-grained access control with IoT policies down to the MQTT topic level."
A block of code is set as follows:
<message name="GetOrderInfo"> <part name="body" element="xsd1:GetOrderRequest"/> </message>
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes. For example: "Cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP provide many options out of the box that can help you to modernize your system."
Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: Email
[email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If you have questions about any aspect of this book, please email us at
[email protected].
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit ht...
