Saturday Architecture

Fixing issues in production is a tough challenge with no/very less debugging options.

How do you handle this? Listen to me and Deepak sharing our experiences

Deepak shares a Telemetry story and its origins

2 bonus stories- A condom tester that failed  / Hubble Telescope did not work on the launch. 

As an architect, the resolutions are an architect and commitment to architecture.

Low Code - No Code is a great opportunity to accelerate businesses and reduce the waiting time for software development . Full Video here   Venkatarangan Thirumalai- Too many moving parts and too much demand.   1. Lo-No Code with 15% growth on IT spend.  2. 28,000 jobs posting on Power Apps on Naukri / Upwork     Deepak Sharma- Development configuration of the No-Lo Code governance needs to thought about.    Venkat - Empower the employee. Shares a beautiful case study of TMobile   Similar to Excel sprawl - Locode Sprawl - What can we do about it?     Venkat - Use of market place within the enterprise and outside. Analogous to Intelligent Ideas by Powerpoint we need #nocodelowcode tools to evolve.    Also gives an analogy of Excel services. IT should focus on Data + API     Nishanth K Pillai The path to #empowerment of business users? IT should spend time to build capability. #citizendeveloper is the person who #architecture support. #blessedbeyondmeasure     Jiffin Akkarappatty  End users are asking for more configuration capability and building templates that can be configured and composed.    IT jobs will NOT be eliminated. Give more respect to end user's learning capabilities.      #digitalbusinesstransformation  #growth

Ready To Eat / Ready Mix food products help reduce #technicaldebt.  Deepak Sharma: It is not a build or buy decision anymore, a hybrid decision model needs to be evolved Making the backend more open and flexible. Making microwaves, a stove accessible. Look at the user base to decide  Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam: In startup take caution against eating junk food. IT should identify good tools for #citizendeveloper. Make a menu or catalog of self-service tech components like UIPath / Power Automate  Nagarajan Ramanadhan- In the enterprise there are challenges. Custom self-development for business users. The challenges faced with the approach. What is behavioral driven development? #agilemethodology is needed for this to work level. IT needs to play the role of L&D continuously. He shares his success secrets in a large financial organization. Citizen developer for more than 10 years.  Nishanth K Pillai- The business airline users want the power to do it themselves. Please empower ourselves. We are changing the mindset to let us give full power to business users.

Typically scale out means only from a technical perspective. Here we take a look at it from business and other perspectives as well. 

The relevance of the customer journey 06:03 Deepak - A key step is the addition of customer experience. What is the value being delivered?   09:23 Gowtham - Challenges in meeting the business the process takes precedence over the customer journey experience   14:55 Venkat - Challenges in making the customer journey. Processes make it easy.  17:32 Gaurav - Process is a de-risking method. Instead of design thinking doing event storming Capture metadata for each step in the customer journey. Event storming is a concept which can be applied. Relation to microservices.   https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/ddd-event-storming   34:27 Gaurav - Elimination of events helps enhance customer experience Retiring business events. Political/economic impact of retiring event   39:20 Deepak - Example for event elimination   40:12 Gaurav - Elimination of events leads to a better event more relevant a great example Better

Sanjay Narang a leading Cloud expert joins us to explain.   Multicloud - Why does it matter as a consumer? As a CTO of a startup, it impacts me. For a larger enterprise, it most definitely does and is unavoidable.   04:30 - What are challenges faced by my enterprise? - Sanjay It helps in reducing cost. Reducing cost by reducing consumption.   10:40 Gowtham - Negotiating with a cloud vendor is tough because more discount happens with a large deal. Is multi-cloud really necessary?  15:45 - Sanjay - How do we backup/migrate an app from one cloud to another cloud provider? What should be aware of?   17:50 - Venkat - Challenges faced by a startup in using multi-cloud providers.   20:05 Nishanth - As an application provider hosting a custom application impact on multi-cloud what would he be worried about? Time to market is a key factor for a Saas provider.   Have 3 broad scenario -   Power BI for Reports ( Vendor-specific capability )  GitHub / Azure DevOps ( nearly equivalent cloud providers available )  Infrastructure VMs - ( Vendor agnostic capability )   26:48 Deepak - How to prepare for a multi-cloud approach as an architect?   32:48 Sanjay - Setting a constraint that my application needs to be portable can hamper business agility. Why is that not a great idea? By doing  this we lose the ability to leverage innovation happening in the world   43:26 Kumaran: Demonstrates a cloud-specific innovation. If portability is taken too seriously then we will lose out on innovation.   45:55 Sidamma: Challenges of multi-cloud. Share her experience of Aviatrics multi-cloud management   48:40 Deepak - Scattershot approach to architecture to multi-cloud.   49:45 Sanjay - 90+ providers for multi-cloud, so it is hard to choose what will work for you.

This lot of knowledge/blogs/technical articles out there. But a "how-to" handle my real-life problems is a scarce resource. Gaurav Aggarwal shares a lot of wisdom in this long episode of applying architecture concepts to challenges we face as architects. His "no-nonsense" and "no-fluff" answers were extremely insightful, inspiring and last but not the lease implementable.  01:00 Why certifications low in large enterprises? how to accelerate your organization as Cxo / VP? 03:00 CTOs are hands-on nowadays  04:30 Difference in the interaction between CTOs and CIOs? 05:10 Old way of learning vs new way of learning for cloud-based - what how to learn?  08:30 - Do Digital buzzword generates new business?  10:00 - Never do POCs, do Proof Of Architecture POAs get a million dollar deal 14:00 Architects beyond business knowledge should also learn marketing. 17:00 What to do when 80% It Budget is spent on lights-on for driving Digital Transformation? 19:45 Change in IT customer needs post-Covid 21:30 When doing legacy transformation, how to show value to business? 25:00 How can an Enterprise architect unlocking value and increase revenue in weeks and not months? 28:00 Does enterprise architecture still valuable in today's fast-changing world? 31:30 Too much strategy time and money spent without seeing value for end-users in short time 39:00 What is financial engineering for architects? Why is that a necessity today? How to become a good financial engineer? 44:00 Is in-sourcing the trend for large organizations? If yes will it kill the services business? What can we do? 51:00 How and when does a Buzzword convert to necessity? - Gowtham 54:30 How is the architect helping the business grow? - Jiffin Can you reduce the cost of sales? 59:00 How to make change management easier which will drive sales? Is someone spends is same for 2 years 1:04:00 What is Finops in an IT organization  1:07:00 Multi-Cloud makes financial engineering tougher. How to handle it - Sidamma  1:19:00 With technologies changing so fast, How I can handle an interview which wants a completely new technology that I have not worked on at all? I don't have time to master it for getting a new role or job.  01:25:00 With so many choices how do I choose the appropriate technology or Platform for my solution?

Consistency is a key attribute needed for architecture. But that hardly gets focus.  Kumaran - Consistency is hard in architecture. What does it mean? Why is it needed   https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=40 Deepak - Shares insight to spot the architectural issue happening and consistency missing like a GPS    https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=378 Nishan - is it true that consistency matters?   https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=660    Venkat - Focus on one area to build consistency for building people team     https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=845      ** How to build consistency ** Nishan - Involve the business in architecture reviews. Helps cross domain knowedge     https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=660 Venkat - Focus on one area to build consistency for building people team     https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=2550 Deepak - Meet regularly helps. Shares his personal experience from his life of 20 years. Deal with pitfalls of not happening. Connects to Kirk Patrick Level 4 learning    https://youtu.be/TmA7vBowCRU?t=2134

Kumaran - Automation / Robotic Process Automation is not considered a key asset/tool in the technology architect's box today. There is still a need to go to application/programming languages. How important is the automation tools of UIPath/Automation Anywhere/Power Automate matter?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n3OxYDd6Ls

What does automation mean? Karthick - Automation is more for delivering better quality than cost reduction. Tools Level 1 call - Jenkins / Python. Level 2 -  Webmethod / Mulesoft   https://youtu.be/6n3OxYDd6Ls?t=204

Deepak - Automation depends on the domain/context-specific. Draws a difference between "Citizen automation" and "non-citizen automation" tools. Now non-programmers can also automate. It is worth your while in doing automation? Can "no-code" automation like AA/UIPath/Power Automate replace programming? Because it is difficult to evaluate all use case we take a longer time to put specifications in place. Or use a workaround, to begin with, but consider that no-code as a first-class citizen.  https://youtu.be/6n3OxYDd6Ls?t=1103  What and how to leverage the new technologies? What would be its benefits? 

Kathick / Venkat / Deepak  -  See the upside of adding these to the architect's toolbox. Will be glad to use something like that. Save time. Reduce pain. Worth investigating. We should use no-code which will help in customization as the user needs to change. Reduces the Time To market. When using "no-code" automation drastically helps justify a business case. Deliver more for less. Gives an interesting warning about "no-code" automation and what to look out for as opportunities.    https://youtu.be/6n3OxYDd6Ls?t=1620  

Kumaran - Once this is successful, it makes most developers job more redundant. Actually empowers business users. Programmers are not more king of technology hill. What needs to be done? Is it all good not quite, https://youtu.be/6n3OxYDd6Ls?t=2880