Next Generation Application Architecture Strategy and Approaches

Service Architecture – Microservices Adoption Strategy

As part of defining services strategy outlining of front to back architecture need to be established. As first step, defining service boundaries and associated data integration points. Need to undertake "Design First" approach as per Open API standards. Create guidelines, Patterns, Playbooks & Exemplars for Microservices Adoption. Microservices framework handles common concerns.

Use Microservice patterns covering: Domain driven design, Strangler, CQRS, Circuit breaker, API gateway, Composite services, Service mesh and discovery, Distributed tracing, log aggregation, service caching, blue green and canary deployment, Config management, 12 factor principles, cloud native architecture.

• Adopting Platform Agnostic and Cloud Native approach
• Integrated with Agile and DevOps methodologies

Hosting/Cloud deployment Strategy

Design for Redundancy and High Availability/DR – Availability zones, Regions, Traffic Manager, Load balancer. As part of Cloud deployment strategy the following factors need to be considered.

• Elastic and Scalable - Autoscaling, Infra as Code
• Fast Startup and disposable – Containers and Container Orchestration
• Loose coupling - Services connected through API gateways and event bus
• Cloud Security – IAM, Roles, Groups, VPC, Security groups, Firewalls, Integration with AD/LDAP/Auth Provider, Security advisor for vulnerabilities, threat detection
• Hybrid cloud connectivity – Gateways, VPN access
• Multi Cloud – Multi cloud management, service provisioning, monitoring
• Performance Monitoring – Alerting mechanism for service/instance outages
• Cloud Storage – Blobs, Files for unstructured data access through REST and SMB
• Managed SQL/NoSQL databases for high availability, throughput and reliability of data
• Cloud Automation – Automated provisioning using templates, integration with CI/CD pipeline

Performance Strategy

Mainly covers the Caching strategy for boosting application performance

• Caching access patterns
• Cache-aside, Read through, Write through, Write behind, Read ahead
• Cache types : Object store, Key value, In-memory, Static content, database caching, Edge caching
• Cache eviction policy: LRU, LFU, MRU, FIFO
• Cache solutions: Memcached, Redis, DAX, CDN (edge caching)

Enterprise Digital Integration Strategy

Enterprise Digital Integration Strategy addresses Microservices Integration, Event Driven Integration, API Integration, ERP integration etc.

• Federated ESB or Microservice Integration – reusable, single responsibility, loosely coupled services
• Event driven – Enable decoupling through event streams, event bus, producers and consumers and real-time analytics
• API driven - B2B Integration with Partners, Customers by exposing API, abstraction of details
• Enterprise Application Integration – Abstract the ERP/Core systems behind API, Anti Corruption layer
• Access via API Gateway - Endpoints, Security, Routing, Proxy, Metering, Resiliency, External and Internal API
• API Creation, Discovery, Lifecycle management, Documentation, Traffic Control, Monitoring

Security Strategy

Enterprise Application Security approaches covers,

• Authentication/SSO – Integrate application/service authentication with AD for SSO
• Data security –Secure routing of traffic from application host to database, apply encryption of data in database, Secure external access by applying SSL (wherever possible)
• Application Code Security – Static testing of developed code, dynamic testing of code against typical vulnerabilities, penetration testing, Secure Code review
• Web/API Security – SSL Certificates, mutual TLS, Integration with AD, OAuth/JWT
• Network security – Cloud/Enterprise Firewall, traffic filtering, service endpoint security

Agile & DevSecOps Strategy

Architecture need to provide support for end to end DevOps lifecycle and enterprise tools. Supports Continuous Delivery Framework, DevSecOps Governance framework and Agile Change Management framework. Need to establish,

• Platforms & Automations
• DevSecOps Platform Delivery 
• Enabling Continuous Testing

Search Strategy

Search is the main navigation method for eCommerce users. The main aim of the search is retrieving the most relevant matches to user queries while omitting other generic website content. Search strategies to provide enhanced user experience. It covers

• Full-text search: the ability to handle everything from simple words and phrases to multiple forms of a word or phrase
• Fuzzy search: recognition of typos, spelling corrections
• Synonym search: identifying synonyms to best serve the query
• Faceted search: a count of attributes and variations to help customers spot specific sizes, models or colors
• Filters: to narrow results for desirable parameters only
• Highlighting; a visual signpost among the results of words used in the search
• Support for structured and unstructured data like pdf, word, images etc

Content, Information Taxonomy and DAM Strategy

It covers the strategy for content creation, access, management, SEO, personalize and distribution, audience per content type and KPI for content publishing. Highlights are,

• Strategy for information taxonomy by domain, apps, departments, search, global and custom needs, asset metadata, KPI for taxonomy usage
• Strategy for DAM namely assets ingestion, deletion, sub-asset handling, metadata extraction, self service, browse, search, download, admin tools, asset templates, catalog producer, asset linking.

Channels Strategy

Channel Strategy need to address,

• Web/Mobile, Responsive design, White label approach
• Adapting cloud based “headless architecture” to manage contents across the markets
• Adopting scalable UI frameworks using micro front-end based architectural principles
• Integrating with other enterprise systems using “Content as a services (API)” based architecture
• Adopting Micro-services based design principles