Episode 37: Cloud-native enterprise architecture, with Matt Curry & Andrew Clay Shafer

Software Defined Interviews

Let’s finally get to the punchline on this “cloud-native enterprise architect” quest. Here, Matt Curry, Andrew Clay Shafer, and I discuss the things that would motivate such a role and try to chart out what functions the cloud-native EA would serve. This still doesn’t answer the question perfectly, but it does point towards good why’s and even some how’s. We do alright at trying to pull it all together.

Rough Outline

• Business “outcomes.”
• “So what is it you’d say you do here?”
• Marketing and sales for tech decision making - getting budget, etc.
• The EA Strawperson - biz/IT alignment, governance, proscribing stacks
• Risk-modeling and procurement costs get better
• EA as the ROI whisperer.
• SRE book discussions, Pivotal Conversations #58 (Andrew and Coté).
• The technology, and what’s new? AWS RDS as an (almost) end-to-end example.
• So, EA’s jobs to this point: business stuff… versus defining the platform and tech choices (e.g., “use this pagination library or die!”).
• But: product people do the business stuff… you prescribe one platform/PaaS… and then most teams now choose their own stuff above the platform.
• And doesn’t microservices do the rest…?
• Cloud-native EA’s probably spend a lot more attention to process, like SRE-thinking… reducing duplication of services… someone has to have a global, big picture view of everything.
• Being a change agent: boot-strapping to this DevOps/cloud-native/blah blah
• The ultimate goal: the business wants to evolve quickly, try new things to try to grow and defend itself quicker; the IT must work, or, at least, be resilient; I don’t want to pay a lot for this muffler; making it easy to do the right thing. # Background
• Past discussions on cloud-native EA: Pivotal Conversations #72 and Coté Show #36.
• Some rough notes on research.
• Books: Enterprise Architecture as Strategy and Continuous Architecture.