Your First, Best, Choice - for Quickly Understanding Salesforce From An Architect's Perspective.
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| image source: Amazon.com |
Salesforce Architect’s Handbook, A Comprehensive End-to-End Solutions Guide
Authors: Dipanker Jyoti, James A. Hutcherson
Available on Amazon
Available from Apress:
Full Disclosure: At my request, Susan McDermott, Executive Editor with Apress®, graciously provided me with a copy of this book to review.
As a knowledge foundation stone, this book is an excellent start for any developer, manager, or architect to begin their Salesforce learning journey.
The first thing you should know about my reaction to reading this book: Respect for the obvious effort that went into organizing the content, and the brevity and clarity of the writing.
There is a particular word that came to mind as I slowly worked my way through the chapters of this book. It is a word I reserve for writing that is of an exceptionally high quality. That word is “crisp”. This is praise that I do not give lightly, or frequently.
The second word that comes to mind, when reviewing this book: Holistic.
This is not a book on Salesforce programming – nor on how to administer it. There are plenty of books available on those topics. No, this book – as its title states – has a focus – and it delivers.
This book is about understanding Salesforce capabilities, in their context, to enable an architect to design solutions. And it does that very well.
Salesforce is such a large topic to try to cover in a single book – of any reasonable length (this one is 383 pages, including the index). It would be easy for less talented authors to fill the pages with information that would drown the user. But not so in this book. There were keen eyes involved in crafting this book – a balance and focus is held – that guides the reader through that which is essential for an architect’s concerns.
As a consultant – frequently engaged by organizations that have chosen the Salesforce platform as a key component in their Enterprise Architecture – I have been keeping my eye out for a good book to recommend to those that I mentor. This book will be at the top of my list to suggest, going forward.
This book is an excellent overview and introduction to Salesforce for architects – whether Enterprise Architects, Solution Architect, System Architects, Domain Architects, Integration Architect, Security Architects, or Managers – who lead engineering teams.
What I particularly liked:
If you suddenly find yourself assigned to your very first Salesforce project – this is the first book you want to read.
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| Open Policy Agent icon, source: openpolicyagent.org |
In a hybrid cloud environment, one of the challenging aspects is maintaining a uniform and consistent set of policies - for security, run-time governance, etc. The current state of variability in how such policies are defined and managed - when comparing different platforms and vendor products - illustrates the incredibly challenging problem this entails.
The intent of Open Policy Agent seems to hold much hope for what I would like to see as a standard solution - the possibility for a truly plug-and-play strategy for defining policies - abstracted from the vendor-specific implementation details.
Open Policy Agent Graduates at CNCF
https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/02/opa-cncf-graduation/
"OPA's goals are to decouple policy from the code, unify policy enforcement, and enable policy-as-code. OPA uses a DSL called Rego to describe its policies. An OPA engine can run as a library, sidecar or daemon with the application. OPA policies can be updated dynamically by polling a Bundle service API to download "bundles" - a collection of policies and data."
"OPA integrates with various systems including Kubernetes, Envoy, CoreDNS, Kafka and Helm. There is also first-class integration between OPA and Kubernetes now with the OPA Gatekeeper which provides Kubernetes-native CRDs for working with the policy library."
"CNCF hosts another policy engine called Kyverno - which uses JSON/YAML instead of a custom DSL."
https://www.openpolicyagent.org/
Policy-based control for cloud native environments
https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/
https://github.com/open-policy-agent/
While this video is intended to humorously show the tension between developers and QA - it also works as a great illustration of an abuse of Information Architecture.
Two of the comments posted on this YouTube video are noteworthy:
My Commentary:
A counter-argument. Imagine a screen with a dozen data entry fields - and one is a comment box. Imagine the chaos that ensues - if the user happily and merrily just enters values into that - instead of some of the correct/intended fields.
Some of the worst "knots" I've seen in Information Architecture - involvedreuseabuse of a comment field - with no consistency in how data is entered, encoded, labeled.
Overloaded use of a field, while mixing the data types, reusing the same field for multiple purposes, etc. - eventually leads to a Gordian Knot - of epic proportions....
There is latent power in the relationships that you have developed.
By connecting people, making introductions, referring opportunities - you weave the threads that may give someone hope, provide a spark, shine a light, open a door.
Use your power, for good.
Reach out.
Lift others up.
Give back.
Whether your action is appreciated or acknowledged - is not the important thing.
Though your action may only be a drop in an endless ocean.
Oceans are made up of such drops.