2023-04-27 Thursday - Architecture Assessment for a SaaS startup

 

[image credit: MustangJoe on pixabay.com]

As a favor for a friend, I'm spending time over the next two weeks to prepare an Architecture Assessment report (usually 80-240 pages) for a new startup that completed their SaaS platform development last year.

This is where the depth and breadth of my decades of experience - as a CTO, Principal Architect, Enterprise Architect, Business Architect, Cloud Architect, Data Architect, Integration Architect, Solution Architect, Security Consultant, Site Reliability Engineer, DevSecOps, Development Manager, and Software Engineer - all come into play.

I relish these types of tasks - for it exercises all of my "Army of One" skills:

• Business Strategy, Vision, Mission analysis
• Business Architecture (Application Portfolios, Business Capabilities & Business Process analysis)
• NFR Analysis: Availability, Capacity, Configuration Management, Deployment, Documentation, Disaster Recovery, Scalability, Reliability, Performance, Security, ..., ... (some of the 46 key NFRs I examine during any Architecture Assessment)
• Domain Architecture
• Infrastructure & Cloud cost optimizations
• Data Architecture & Database design
• API Strategy & Integration Architecture
• Security Architecture (Authentication, Authorization, Encryption, Supply Chain, ...)
• Software Engineering Best Practices (Clean Code, SOLID principles, ...)
• Risk Mitigation
• Strategic & Tactical Roadmap Planning
• IT recommendations for building/reinforcing Intellectual Property "moats"

After a very preliminary review of the deployment architecture information- I have some hunches on where Cloud hosting costs may be reduced.

Within just the first 20 minutes of beginning my deep dive into the codebase - I have over a dozen preliminary findings/recommendations.