Solutions Architecture

Solution architecture is the building blocks of solution development in the organization. It helps to create a successful solution in a complex organization, where product development has dependencies on multiple groups

Solution architecture not only considers the requirements of the business, but also handles critical, non-functional requirements such as scalability, high availability, maintainability, performance, security, and so on.

A solution architect is a person who is responsible for designing solution architecture by collaborating across stakeholders.

The solution architect analyzes the functional requirement and defines a non-functional requirement in order to cover all aspects of the solution and avoid any surprises.

Each solution has multiple constraints such as cost, budget, timeline, regulatory, and so on, and the solution architect considers them, while also creating the design and making technology selection.

The solution architect develops a proof of concept and prototype in order to evaluate various technology platforms, and then chooses the best strategy for solution implementation

The initial design of a solution architecture may be conceived at a very early stage during the pre-sales cycle, such as the request for proposal (RFP) or the request for information (RFI) and is followed by the creation of a prototype or proof of concept, in order to discover any solution risk.

Solution architect also identifies whether to build a solution or to source it. It helps to identify technology selection, while also keeping an organization’s critical security and compliance requirements in mind.

There could be two primary situations for creating a solution architecture:

• First, enhancing technology for an existing application, which may include hardware refresh or software re-architecting
• Second, to create a new solution from scratch, where you get more flexibility to choose the best fit of technology to address a business requirement

In the absence of solution architecture, there is a chance that:

• software development could fail
• projects can
  • get delayed,
  • get over budget,
  • and not deliver enough functionalities.

A single problem can have multiple solutions, and each solution has its constraints.

A good solution architecture addresses the depth of different tools and technologies by investigating all possible architectural strategies, based on the mixed-use case, techniques, tools, and code reuse, which comes from years of experience.

Non functional requirements: