Abstract: Listen to Wei Qun, huawei cloud MVP with 15 years of software development and architecture experience, how to become a qualified solution architect?
Architect, which is a sacred position in the eyes of technical personnel, especially software developers.
When you have an architect on your team, you have a technical backbone and technical support. Many programmers also dream of becoming architects, who can control the overall situation, overall design, and make systems with their own unique marks.
So what is a solution architect? What qualities do we need to be a qualified solution architect?
Listen to Wei Qun, the MVP of Huawei Cloud, who has 15 years of experience in software development and architecture.
Getting to know architects for the first time
When it comes to the topic of architect, Wei Qun has a lot of feelings.
“Shortly after joining the team in 2004, we had an architect who was responsible for the overall design and writing some basic code. Out of curiosity for Daniel, I often looked at his code deliberately. Frankly, I was often confused at that time. He used a lot of layering, encapsulation and interface design that seemed useless when the problem could be solved easily.”
Later, with the increase of project experience and programming skills of ascension, Wei Qun just know this is what we call software architecture, * * seem tedious code, the essence is to solve the problem of the complexity of software system, the * * in order to better support for developers to write more robust business code, more flexible response to the individual needs and ultimately provide products with better quality and extension of flexibility.
The experience of working with this architect also directly influenced Wei Qun’s future technical pursuit and development plan.
According to Wei qun, the core of architecture is planning, design and identification. An architect is a specialized role responsible for solving domain-specific problems from these three core perspectives.
For the IT technology industry, architects can be divided into four simple categories:
· Technology-specific Architect (TSA) : Focus on Specific technologies such as Specific development languages, software systems, network security, data, etc.
· Infrastructure Architect (IA) : Refining the accumulation of optimization technology;
· Solution Architect (SA) : solutions that focus on specific goals and requirements;
· Enterprise Architect (EA) : Focuses on Enterprise technology roadmap and technology development direction.
This classification order is exactly the path of the architect, that is, from a relatively focused specialized architect to a more abstract, comprehensive enterprise architect with top-level enterprise design capabilities.
In this process, the solution architect is an important node, which requires more comprehensive capabilities and technology, facing more complex business and environment, and is the path to enterprise architecture.
How to Grow an architect (from the Web)
The following will explain the qualities and abilities of solution architects and how to become a qualified solution architect, for the students who are interested in becoming solution architects.
What are the capabilities of a solution architect in a real-world context?
Generally speaking, the solution is to continuously optimize the combination and innovation of various products, technologies or theoretical methods, so as to meet the specific goals and needs of users.
The solution architect abstracts from the clutter of business requirements and problem phenomena to refine and design solutions that help clients turn ideas, problems, and requirements into executable, actionable projects.
At the same time, the solution architect must have cross-domain capabilities, both horizontal and vertical.
Vertical is the depth of precipitation in a certain field, horizontal is the breadth of knowledge across business fields. Solution architects often encounter scenarios of comprehensive analysis and design across multiple domains during the solution design process, which is a major source of challenge. On the other hand, a business with clear boundaries and simple logic may not need an architect.
From the competency model perspective, the solution architect should have a comprehensive competency system that is centered on the intrinsic qualities of the individual (in fact, this is the core of all jobs), as well as business, technical, and interpersonal skills.
Solution Architecture Capability Model (from the Network)
Wei shared an example: In order to better respond to the epidemic and support online learning for medical staff, his company needed to quickly develop a distance medical education platform.
The project involves the selection of technologies related to video live broadcasting. After preliminary investigation, it is found that various video service solutions provided by Huawei Cloud, such as video live broadcasting, interactive live broadcasting, video conference, real-time audio and video, seem to be able to support the demand for live broadcasting in the telemedicine and education project, and the development team is at a loss to begin.
At this point, architects are required to fully and multi-dimensional cross-technology, cross-business and cross-scenario understanding and research on these seemingly usable products and services, to find the correct selection of the optimal solution, so as to build the most appropriate solution.
In this context, the project team’s software architect identified three key requirements:
1. Multiple teachers participate in live teaching, and real-time audio and video interaction;
2. There is no limit on the number of students;
3. Students can interact live via video.
According to the combing results, it is found that the technical scheme of live broadcast shall meet the following requirements:
1. Real-time audio and video capabilities (software capabilities);
2. Can dynamically adjust network support for live broadcast according to the number of viewers (network capability);
3. Without the support of professional video equipment (hardware capability);
Based on the above and multi-dimensional analysis with the assistance of Huawei Cloud, Wei Qun and his team finally chose the interactive live broadcast program to realize the platform’s video capabilities, and finally achieved the desired goal perfectly and won users’ praise.
This is based on cross-technology, cross-business, cross-scenario multi-domain convergence analysis and provide solutions.
How to become a solution architect?
In Wei Qun’s opinion, in order to become a qualified solution architect, it is more necessary to strengthen training and accumulation in three dimensions of accomplishment: mentality, ability and method.
First, in terms of mentality, we should have a never-say-die challenge mentality, a learning mentality that beats every minute, and an open mind. As the most professional consulting service personnel, we should be able to respond to the needs of various industries and fields and various styles of customers at any time. You never know what kind of questions and challenges a client is going to throw at you until you sit across from him, so courage and confidence in the unknown is important. Secondly, the rapid learning ability, from the unknown to the concept, from the concept to the theory, from the theory to practice, from practice to experience, this is an inevitable process of changing the unknown into known.
Another is to respect and fear and an open mind in the face of every industry, every field and every business participants, avoid blind men and expectations, to keep yourself in a correct position and Angle to look at problems, while focusing attention to every detail, and then find the most suitable train of thought.
Second, skills, to have a high degree of abstraction ability, efficient communication ability, professional business ability, extensive technical ability, grounding implementation ability.
The solution architect may not be proficient or in-depth in every technology, but he must have a breadth of knowledge and be able to grasp common, leading logical technology implementations in terms of technical requirements.
The other is the ability to implement. Solution architects need to be able to translate their solutions into results, not just on paper.
The third is the method, must have the strategic thinking method, the design thinking method. The solution architect must have an effective working method for capability transformation output.
Among them, strategic thinking is the biggest difference between architects and ordinary technical personnel, including revealing phenomena based on keen insight, touching the essence, and then constructing by association, thinking about solutions from the top level and systematizing, so as to solve the fundamental problems to the maximum.
Design thinking, on the other hand, takes certain steps (empathy, problem definition, creativity, prototyping, testing and iterative output) from the same perspective as user experience to construct solutions in micro-scale and focus on proposing meaningful creativity and ideas to solve practical problems of specific groups of people.
conclusion
The above is Wei Qun’s understanding and thinking about solution architect.
A good solution architect must be a “generalist” who can tell stories when he goes out, write solutions when he comes back, and lead projects for implementation. All three aspects are indispensable.
To become this “all-rounder”, there is a way but no shortcut. It requires correct attitude and learning from each other, coupled with continuous practice, summary and precipitation, to become a qualified and true solution architect.
Some references are from:
What is an architect?
zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/38780884
Kai Ge tells a story [001] Solution Architect competency model
www.jianshu.com/p/bd9962ba3…
To be a person, to be an architect, and to analyze the capability model of an architect
Blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog\_757…
Huawei Cloud MVP Wei Qun: How to become an Excellent solution Architect. We are all cloud experts.
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