Architecture life cycle

Working under architecture means that solutions are designed, implemented and deployed according to an underlying architecture.

During the design of a system, architects make architectural decisions. Architectural decisions are those design decisions that are the hardest to change later on and have large impact on the project as a whole. Which decisions are exactly architecturally relevant is not easy to define and is highly dependent on the type of system designed. Design decisions that do not influence the architecture of the system are not considered architecturally relevant and can be made by the designers and developers of the system.

During projects the architect must govern that the architectural decisions are respected and not violated by the designers, developers, implementers, testers, or other stakeholders.

After the project is delivered the architecture must be guarded during the full life cycle of the delivered system to ensure the architecture is not compromised when changes are performed to the system. For instance a perfectly architected high available solution could undergo a change in some network equipment after a few years of operation that eliminates the high availability of the system by introducing a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). The system managers performing the change might not be aware of the introduction of the SPOF, but the architect guarding all changes to the system should be aware of architecture threatening changes. It is therefore of great value to have the architecture governed during the full life cycle of a system; from creation of the first design elements to the day the system is decommissioned.


This entry was posted on Sunday 25 May 2014

Earlier articles

Quantum computing

Security at cloud providers not getting better because of government regulation

The cloud is as insecure as its configuration

Infrastructure as code

DevOps for infrastructure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Hyper) Converged Infrastructure

Object storage

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

What's the point of using Docker containers?

Identity and Access Management

Using user profiles to determine infrastructure load

Public wireless networks

Supercomputer architecture

Desktop virtualization

Stakeholder management

x86 platform architecture

Midrange systems architecture

Mainframe Architecture

Software Defined Data Center - SDDC

The Virtualization Model

What are concurrent users?

Performance and availability monitoring in levels

UX/UI has no business rules

Technical debt: a time related issue

Solution shaping workshops

Architecture life cycle

Project managers and architects

Using ArchiMate for describing infrastructures

Kruchten’s 4+1 views for solution architecture

The SEI stack of solution architecture frameworks

TOGAF and infrastructure architecture

The Zachman framework

An introduction to architecture frameworks

How to handle a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack

Architecture Principles

Views and viewpoints explained

Stakeholders and their concerns

Skills of a solution architect architect

Solution architects versus enterprise architects

Definition of IT Architecture

What is Big Data?

How to make your IT "Greener"

What is Cloud computing and IaaS?

Purchasing of IT infrastructure technologies and services

IDS/IPS systems

IP Protocol (IPv4) classes and subnets

Infrastructure Architecture - Course materials

Introduction to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Fire prevention in the datacenter

Where to build your datacenter

Availability - Fall-back, hot site, warm site

Reliabilty of infrastructure components

Human factors in availability of systems

Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Performance - Design for use

Performance concepts - Load balancing

Performance concepts - Scaling

Performance concept - Caching

Perceived performance

Ethical hacking

The first computers

Open group ITAC /Open CA Certification


Recommended links

Ruth Malan
Gaudi site
Esther Barthel's site on virtualization
Eltjo Poort's site on architecture


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The postings on this site are my opinions and do not necessarily represent CGI’s strategies, views or opinions.

 

Copyright Sjaak Laan