What should the architecture of the senior chief architect look like?

"The architecture of the perspective of everyone is different, the ebay, Ctrip, and so on, the only platform-based internet companies have worked as an old driver on the platform architecture perspective and share the architectural experience. Opinion, welcome to the discussion.

This article starts with the INFOQ vertical public number chat architecture ",id:archtime.

My understanding of the architecture definition

About 7-8 years ago, I had an American counterpart architect mentor who told me that architecture was actually discovering stakeholders (stakeholder) and then addressing their concerns (concerns), and then I read a book "Software system architecture: Working with stakeholders using viewpoints and perspectives", It is also stated in the concept that the goal of the system architecture is to address stakeholder concerns.

This is from the one in the book, I used to share the schema definition is often in this diagram, the architecture is defined as:

1. Each system has a schema

2. Schemas are composed of schema elements and their relationships to each other

3. Systems are built to meet the needs of stakeholders (stakeholder)

4. Stakeholders have their own point of concern (concerns)

5. Schemas are described by the schema document

6. The schema document describes a series of architectural perspectives

7. Each perspective is addressed and corresponds to the stakeholder's point of concern.

before architecting the system, the architect's first priority is to identify all stakeholders , business parties, product managers, customers/users, development managers, engineers, project managers, testers, OPS, product operators, and so on, all of whom may be stakeholders, Architects should fully communicate with stakeholders, understand their concerns and pain points, and work out a framework to address these concerns.

architects often make mistakes by missing out on important stakeholders, and inadequate communication will result in a lack of architecture that does not meet the needs of stakeholders. stakeholder concerns are likely to be conflicting, such as management (manageability) vs. Technology (performance), Business (M.F.B. s) vs technology (reliable and stable), which requires architects to be flexible and balanced, and how to balance the architect's level and value.

The 2nd definition of architecture is that architecture focuses on non-functional requirements (non-functional requirements), the so-called-abilities.

This is a picture I shared in my last company.

This is slideshare a PPT in the interception, two graphs are listed in the architecture of the non-functional focus on how to measure the level of the architecture, last year I saw a word that has a great influence on me.

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant was measured by cost of cha Nge.

In Chinese, architecture represents a design decision that plays a key role in the shaping of a system, and the system is basically shaped, and the key here can be determined by the cost of change. This sentence is Grady Booch said, he is one of the founders of UML.

Further, the goal of the architecture is to manage complexity, variability, and uncertainty to ensure that part of the architecture changes during long-term system evolution without undue negative impact on other parts of the architecture. This ensures agility in business and research and development, allowing the variable parts of the application to change frequently, with minimal impact on other parts of the application.

When I first entered the software development industry, the architecture was mainly performance, high availability and so on. Now, have seen countless legacy systems, especially the status of domestic enterprise it, countless high-coupling legacy systems, poor architecture like handcuffs tightly limited business, upgrade replacement cost is very large, so I pay more attention to understandable, maintainability, scalability, cost. I would add that it is very important for a startup to get a good architect or CTO at the beginning of a startup.

The iterative and evolutionary nature of architecture

I am an architect of the older generation, who took part in the work in 99. Career beginner a lot of RUP, unified the concept of software process. The RUP philosophy has a deep impact on my architecture, and Rup summarizes three features:

1. Use cases and risk-driven uses case and risk driven

2. Architecture Center Architecture Centric

3. Iterations and increments iterative and incremental

RUP is very focused on architecture, advocating architecture and risk-driven, the project must start with an end-to-end prototype (prototype), by means of a compression test to verify the feasibility of the architecture, and then on a prototype based on continuous iterative and incremental development, development, testing, adjustment architecture, such as development, loop, as shown:

It can be seen that architects are trying to write code as much as possible, doing tests, and then throwing the architecture into the team is very unreliable (unless it's a very clear and mature area). In addition, the technical architecture is a bit of a perfectionist tendency, initially like to seek big perfection, ignoring the evolution and iteration of the architecture, this tendency of easy-to-build products and users can not form effective and rapid feedback, the product does not meet the needs of end users, continue to see the following two graphs:

The first diagram is about the concept of the smallest available product (Minimum viable product, MVP), making the smallest available product, dropping it to the user as soon as possible, and quickly acquiring customer feedback, based on iterative and evolving architectures and products.

The second figure is over-engineering (over Engineering), in fact, it is also said that the product architecture and the user does not form an effective feedback closed loop, the architect to think and the customer is not in one direction, through the smallest available products, fast iterative feedback strategy, can avoid this problem.

Note that before the system is really put into production, a good architecture assumes that the later the product is used by the user, the higher the cost and risk of failure, and the smaller the step, through the MVP rapid experiment, the acquisition of customer feedback, iterative evolution of the product, can effectively reduce the cost and risk of failure.

In addition, many years of experience tell me, architecture, platform is not bought, nor with an open source can be obtained, nor design, but long-term evolution to take root.

Building a closed-loop feedback architecture

First, share a link that has had the deepest impact on my architecture over the years. This article is about DevOps, but the same applies to system architecture:

• http://itrevolution.com/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/

This article describes the three paths to devops for businesses, and let's look at the three pathways that inspire architects.

The first road, the system thinking , the development drive organization organism, its ability is not the production software, but the continuous delivery customer value, the architect needs to have the global view and the system thinking, the thorough understanding entire value delivery chain, from the business demand, the research and development, the test, the integration , to deploy operations, the efficiency of this value chain does not depend on a single or a few links, the results of local optimization is often a global damage, the architect to stand at the system height to optimize the entire value delivery chain, so that enterprises and customers to form a rapid and efficient transfer of value.

The second road, the reinforcement feedback loop , any process improvement goal is strengthens and shortens the feedback loop. The new engineer, also a common problem of Chinese students, is the lack of awareness of production operation and maintenance (monitoring is an important part of system feedback). There are two words to say:

1. No measurement, no improvement no measurement, no improvement or promotion

2. What's your measure is something you get to measure anything and get what

A system without monitoring or monitoring is equivalent to a bare-Ben, high-speed without a dashboard. There is a very good article on measurement-driven development, on INFOQ, to recommend to you:

• Http://www.infoq.com/cn/articles/metrics-driven-development

This article puts forward the concept of metric driven development, called MDD, in the system, application and business three levels, through three levels of monitoring, build three feedback loops, on the basis of monitoring and measurement to continuously improve the system and architecture, I also recently in reference to the concept of design an e-commerce platform technology architecture, see:

This is an e-commerce platform architecture, the entire embodiment of the idea of closed-loop architecture, the right side is the entire platform feedback monitoring link. Specific as follows:

1. The system layer monitors the computing network storage and constructs the feedback loop of the system layer.

2. Application service tiers to monitor business, applications, services, and even the entire development process to build feedback loops for applications and service tiers

3. Customer experience layer, monitor the behavior of end users and analyze site users, build and customer feedback loops

The following diagram shows a general approach to system elevation and improvement:

Closed loop repetition of adjustment, such as measurement----the system, application, process, and customer experience are likely to continue to improve and improve on the basis of measurement data and feedback, otherwise the so-called improvement of no data can only be achieved by taking the head or guessing.

The third path encourages a culture of courage to take responsibility, to risk trial and error, and to continue to ascend. This is the most difficult, and generally related to the density of enterprise talent. Tools, technology, and processes are just a part of a company's iceberg, and the real impact on corporate effectiveness is the underwater part of the iceberg, the people and culture of the enterprise, the architect as a technology and architecture preacher, who has the responsibility to encourage and promote the trial and error culture.

Architects need to understand these three paths, focus on the efficiency of the entire value delivery chain, focus on closed-loop feedback on each link, encourage and drive the company's trial-and-error culture, and create a system-wide closed-loop architecture (architecting for Closed loop feedback) to improve overall system performance. The DevOps and daily delivery is the direction of every Internet system Architect's dream and effort.

Talk about micro-service architecture

Micro Services I think we all listen to a lot, I am also very concerned about and promote micro-services, from a technical point of view, I think the micro-service is mainly reflected in a single responsibility and focus on the separation of ideas, from the single-process module further expanded to cross-process distributed modular. MicroServices are independent development, test, deployment, and upgrade units, as I mentioned in the 1th architecture definition, where each service in the microservices can evolve independently, its cost of change is relatively small, the overall architecture is flexible and is an evolutionary architecture that supports innovation.

Last year Martinfowler wrote two articles, to the micro-service poured cold water, suggest that everyone read it carefully.

1. Http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html

2. Http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePremium.html

This figure tells you when to introduce microservices. Micro-services have additional costs and need to build infrastructure such as frameworks, releases, and monitoring. Start-ups and small-scale teams are not recommended. The main decision is factor system complexity and team size, when reaching a point where a single block architecture seriously affects efficiency before consideration. In addition, microservices are more about organizations and teams than technology.

Structure and organizational culture relationship

Let's talk about Conway's Law :

Conway ' s law:organizations which design systems[...] is constrained to produce designs which is copies of the Communica tion structures of these organizations.
(The organization of the design system, the resulting design and architecture are equivalent to the communication structure between organizations.) )

From a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture is a good embodiment of this law.

The team is distributed, the system architecture is monolithic, development, testing, deployment coordination and communication costs, serious impact on efficiency, serious when the team is also prone to conflict.

Decoupling single-block architectures into microservices, each team develops, tests, and publishes its own responsible microservices, with no distractions and improved system efficiency.

It can be seen that there is a mapping between the organization and the system architecture (1 ~ 1 mapping), and there are a variety of problems with misalignment, on the one hand, if your organizational structure and cultural structure are not supported, you will not be able to successfully build efficient system architectures such as centralized and rigorous functions (business, Dev, QA, Deployment, Ops) enterprises, it is difficult to implement microservices and DevOps, the implementation of Docker/paas platform will be more difficult, such organizational functions are inclined to local optimization (local optimization), unable to form an effective cooperation and closed-loop.

In turn, if your system design or architecture is not supported, then you will not be able to successfully establish an effective organization; As a system architect, it is important to understand Conway's Law and Design system architecture before we see the organization structure, but also the organizational culture (Democratic cooperation, centralization, jungle law, talent density), Then adjust the system architecture or organization structure according to the situation.

Architect mindset and soft skills

empty cup, or open mind (open minded) is a mature architect's due mentality, stay hungry, stay foolish, mentality has more open, the field of view is more open. one sentence from the seven habits of high-performance people ~ Steven ~ Covey is given to each architect:

if a person with considerable ingenuity and I disagree, then the other side of the proposition must have I have not yet realized the mystery, worth to understand. the most important thing to do with people is to pay attention to the different psychology, emotion and intelligence of different individuals, as well as the different worlds seen in the eyes of individuals. Communication with the minded, the benefits are not small, to have a difference to gain.

In addition, we recommend a book, "Software architect 12 Discipline", three points in the book is worth each architect to learn to understand:

1. Soft skills is always tough than hard skills, soft skills harder than tough skills

2. Choosing relationship over correctness, pay attention to the relationship between who is right and who is wrong

3. Architecture is political, and architects working in medium and large companies are especially learning

Politics refers to the art of collaborating with others to get things done, architecture is a social activity, in the technological world, individualism can easily be defeated, even if your goal is good technology is optimal, technical decision-making is a political decision (technical decisions is political decisions), a technical product, a wave of people can do, another wave of people can do, in the end who do good, really bad to say, no matter who do, all to the business set on a pair of handcuffs.

How does the architect improve? Actual combat, actual combat, actual combat! Plan your career, find good teams and projects, summarize share, learn about GitHub open source projects, participate and create your own open source projects and products, and accumulate for a long time.

My views on some of the architects ' controversial themes

The main controversy is two topics:

1. The relationship between technology and business.

2. Does the architect want to write code?

How does the architect answer such questions? A mature architect's mantra: depending on the situation, not necessarily, nor is it depends. Technology and business, architects understand business? Look at products and customers, if it is a business product, it is sure to understand the business, if it is a technical product, it is not necessarily.

The architect wants to write code? Also not necessarily, personal feel as far as possible to write, if you write more than 10 years code, every year not less than 20,000 lines, have played through, can not write. In addition, if the architect writes code, it is important to control, not to drill into the code, to spend a lot of time to solve the details and complexity problems, ignoring the global and systemic problems.

At last

I would like to say that the Internet is developing very well in China, and more and more people are joining the architect industry, and the industry is "growing in all things". But we have not Martin Fuller, Adrian Cockcroft Such a structure of cattle, my generation need to continue to work hard, look forward to China 10-20 years after the emergence of more than 10 Martin Fuller, Adrian Cockcroft such as the God-level characters. We must not cease to explore, and the end of all exploration is to return to the starting point, and the beginning of a first-like understanding.

introduction of the old driver

Yang Bo , with more than 10 years of experience in the development and architecture of Internet distributed systems, has worked in: ebay China Research and Development Center (ebay CDC), as a senior research and development engineer, participate in the development of the Open API platform, Ctrip Travel Network (Ctrip), as the Director of Technology research and development, Leading Ctrip's large-scale SOA architecture, Vipshop, a senior cloud platform architect, is responsible for the research and architecture of the container PAAs platform, and is currently working in the vertical e-commerce division of the LVMH group in China, serving as the chief architect of e-commerce to help transform traditional it to the Internet.

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What should the architecture of the senior chief architect look like?