Overview

When a product has been proved to be a success and has just come out of a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) or MMP (Minimal Marketable Product) state, usually a lot of corners would have been cut in order to get a product out and act on the valuable feedback. So inevitably there will be technical debt to take care of.

What is important is having a technical vision that will reduce costs and provide value/impact/scaleable/resilient/reliable which can then be communicated to all stakeholders.

A lot of cost savings can be made when scaling out by putting together a Cloud Architecture Roadmap. The roadmap can then be communicate with your stakeholders, development teams and most importantly finance. It will provide a high level “map” of where you are now and where you want to be at some point in the future.

A roadmap is every changing, just like when my wife and I go travelling around the world. We will have a roadmap of where want to go for a year but are open to making changes half way through the trip e.g. An earthquake hits a country we planned to visit etc. The same is true in IT, sometimes budgets are cut or a budget surplus needs to be consumed, such events can affect your roadmap.

It is something that you want to review on a regular schedule. Most importantly you want to communicate the roadmap and get feedback from others.

Feedback from other engineers and stakeholders is crucial – they may spot something that you did not or provide some better alternative solutions.

Decomposition

The first stage is to decompose your ideas. Below is a list that helps get me started in the right direction. This is by no means an exhausted list, it will differ based on your industry.

Component	Description	Example
Application Run-time	Where apps are hosted	Azure Kubernetes
Persistent Storage	Non-Volatile Data	File Store Block Store Object Store CDN Message Database Cache
Backup/Recovery	Backup/Redundant Solutions	Managed Services Azure OMS Recovery Vaults Volume Images GEO Redundancy
Data/IOT	Connected Devices / Sensors	Streaming Analytics Event Hubs AI/Machine Learning
Gateway	How services are accessed	Azure Front Door, NGIX, Application Gateway, WAF, Kubernetes Ingress Controllers
Hybrid Connectivity	On-Premise Access Cross Cloud	Express Route Jumpboxes VPN Citrix
Source Control	Where code lives Build – CI/CD	Github, Bitbucket Azure Devops, Octopus Deploy, Jenkins
Certificate Management	SSL Certificates	Azure Key Vault SSL Offloading strategies
Secret Management	Store sensitive configuration	Puppet (Hiera), Azure Keyvault, Lastpass, 1Password
Mobile Device Management	Google Play AppStore	G-Suite Enterprise MDM etc

Once you have an idea of all your components. The next step is to breakdown your road-map into milestones that will ultimately assist in reaching your final/target state. Which of course will not be final in a few years time 😉 or even months!

Sample Roadmap

Below is a link to a google slide presentation that you can use for your roadmap.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Hvw46vcWJyEW5b7o4Xet7jrrZ17Q0PVzQxJBzzmcn2U/edit?usp=sharing

There are several decision we make every day some conscious and many sub conscious. We have a bit more control over the conscious decisions we make in the work place from an Architecture perspective.

If you are into Development, Devops, Site reliability, Technical Product Owner, Architect or event a contract/consultant; you will be contributing to significant decision regarding engineering.

What Database Technology should we use?
What Search Technology will we use that can scale and do we leverage eventual consistency?
What Container Orchestration or Micro-Service platform shall we use?

When making a decision in 2016, the decision may have been perfectly valid for the technology choices for that time. Fast forward to 2019 and if faced with the exact same decision your solution may be entirely different.

This is absolutely normal and this why it is important to have a “journal” where you outline the key reasons/rationale for a significant architecture decision.

It lays the foundation to effectively communicate with stakeholders and to “sell’ your decisions to others; even better to collaborate with others in a manner that is constructive to evaluating feedback and adjusting key decisions.

I keep a journal of decisions and use a powershell inspired naming convention of Verb-Noun. Secondly I will look at what is trending in the marketplace to use as a guide post. So for a logging/Tracking/Metrics stack, I might start off with reference materials.

https://12factor.net/logs – Generalized Concepts around the stack

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/ – More specific towards the technology we will use

This allows me to keep on track with what the industry is doing and forces me to keep up to date with best practices.

Below is sample Decision Record that I use. I hope you may find it useful. I often use them when on-boarding consultants/contractors or new members of the team. It is a great way for them to gain insights into the past and where we going.

In the next blog post, I will discuss formulating an Architecture Roadmap and how to effectively communicate your vision with key stakeholders. Until then, happy decisions and do not be surprised when you sometimes convince yourself out of a bad decision that you made 😉

Now…How do I tell my wife we should do this at home when buying the next sofa?