Evolution of technology architecture has been on continuous paradigm shift; sometimes driving force to be with the infrastructure or most often with the application side of the world driving the change. I call it as a horse & jockey analogy where Application and business being the jockeys define what is required and drives infrastructure. Similarly, the horse being the infrastructure became the force to ensure its winning and developed to shape how the rider rides it.
From the early days of PC. Terminals and mainframes to now the cloud-enabled IAAS and SAAS offerings has changed the technology multifold from not only architecture wise however at a principle layer itself. In today’s enterprise from a monolithic architecture to microservices driven vs the service-oriented architectures have created the demand to change the underlying infrastructure components as well.
Dedicated infrastructure framework adopted too early innovations of logical segmentation and virtualization as well containerization to be walking along the application journey and being supported by those services running on top. Tenancy based models where one hardware platform is being shared across business units, customers or even spread across geographic access is allowing the boundaries to open up and test the limits. The credit cannot be won by one regarding how the evolution started and where its headed towards. Some were the incubators, and some were the adopters that lead to the revolution of the paradigm shift. To name few like Vmware, Dell/EMC and HP were few vendors that caught up on a journey and then so on the other players of a docker, pivotal, Citrix, Microsoft followed along. The list is too long to qualify and put all names in each category of innovation because of the vast portfolio, and then again domain centricity plays a crucial role.
Transition & transformation of technology is another area where the bottom layer infrastructure plays a crucial role, and its move from traditional to new brings its challenges. Multiple offerings are available from infrastructure technology platform migration perspective which starts from the lift shift of environment to platform changes. For example, Unix to Linux and traditional three-tier SAN storage to converged to hyper-converged. The underlying architecture becomes crucial since the older applications are catered or customised to operate with particular hardware or software behaviours and might not behave the same manner with the new transformation shift. While Converged systems to hyper-converged systems I mainstream from infrastructure perspective a lot of enterprises are still shying away to move the enterprise-class workload to those till it stabilises until similar to cloud. Vendors like Nutanix, simplicity (HPE), Vxrail(Dell) and hyperflex(Cisco), VCE(EMC) are known vendors in the market with a pre-established offering of traditional and modern hardware around converged and hyper-convergence.
The enterprise needs to evaluate a primary reason for the move which is causing the enterprise shift, and that could be hard commercial factors like COLO cost, H/w Cost, License savings or soft operational factors consolidated management, effective management, less error count, more power etc. It’s more of use case driven and when you are ready for a new change vs adapting to what is up available in the market because it’s a rat race.
Technology trends shaping industry, below picture, is a reflection on how the trends have been changed over years, and if one enterprise has to evaluate domain by domain just from the infrastructure side of the world, it will easily be able to identify its scorecard index. It is more of technology-centric than of vendor-centric as in today’s market based on acquisition and merger models pretty much every vendor has similar offerings. The more enterprises choose to do use case based definitions; it will help them eliminate some of the waste and plan for future with better investment lock-ins.
Similarly, the role is continuously changing regarding job description as the technical architect is not the only skillset which is looked in the market now, it’s along the lines of business acumen or the application experience. The underlying infrastructure as a technology is fading away with them upcoming server less infrastructure of amazon web service services like Lambda where one does not have to worry about the core infrastructure; it’s the software code that will bring the required machines and power as and when needed.
Starting Point, a simple architecture development process is to define the future state based on the vision, current understanding and gap analysis. In the whole mix of operation, the evaluation of technology architecture comes into effect after the requirement gathering, and current know how. It is similar to shopping in a mall when you see what you need and where you can find, and then the evaluation happens vs the other way round to see the fitment when you find something interesting and try to fit in budget and body type for future needs. These are the critical fundamental aspect of technology architecture to evaluate from when designing, defining or formulating a strategy around execution with mitigation paths.