Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification: 8. Analyzing and Defining Technical Processes - Important Things To Know

Cloud architects contribute to and participate in a wide range of technical and business processes. Some are focused on individual developers and small teams. The software development lifecycle is a series of phases developers go through to understand business requirements, plan the architecture of a solution, design a detailed implementation, develop the code, deploy for use, and maintain it.
Some software development projects can use highly automated CI/CD procedures. This allows for rapid release of features and helps developers catch bugs or misunderstood requirements faster than batch updates that were common in the past.
As systems become more complicated and fail in unanticipated ways, it is important to learn from those failures. A post-mortem analysis provides the means to learn from minor and major incidents in a blameless culture.
Large enterprises with expansive portfolios of software employ additional organization-level processes in order to manage dynamic IT and business environments. ITIL is a well-established set of enterprise practices for managing the general, service, and technical aspects of an organization’s IT operations.
Business continuity planning is the process of preparing for major disruptions in an organization’s ability to deliver services. Disaster planning is a subset of business continuity planning and focuses on making IT services available in the event of a disaster.
 

1. Understand that information systems are highly dynamic and individual developers, teams, businesses, and other organizations use technical processes to manage the complexity of these environments. Technical processes have been developed to help individual developers to entire organizations function and operate in a coordinated fashion. SDLC processes focus on creating, deploying, and maintaining code. Other processes include CI/CD, post-mortem analysis, and business continuity planning.
2. Know that the first stage of the SDLC is analysis. This involves identifying the scope of the problem to address, evaluating options for solving the problem, and assessing the costs/benefits of various options. Options should include examining building versus buying. Cost considerations should include the opportunity costs of developers’ time and the competitive value of the proposed software development effort.
3. Understand the difference between high-level and detailed design. High-level design focuses on major subcomponents of a system and how they integrate. Architecture decisions, such as when to use asynchronous messaging or synchronous interfaces, are made during the high-level design. Detailed design describes how subcomponents will be structured and operate. This includes decisions about algorithms and data structures. Decisions about frameworks and libraries may be made during either high-level or detailed design.
4. Know the three kinds of documentation. Developer documentation is for other software engineers to help them understand application code and how to modify it. Operations documentation is for DevOps engineers and system administrators so that they can keep systems functioning. 5. A runbook is documentation that describes steps to run an application and correct operational problems. User documentation is for users of the system, and it explains how to interact with the system to have it perform the functions required by the user.
6. Understand the benefits of CI/CD. CI/CD is the process of incorporating code into a baseline of software, testing it, and if the code passes tests, releasing it for use. A key benefit of CI/CD is that new features can be rolled out for use by customers quickly. This may not always be an option. For example, safety critical software may require substantial testing and validation before it can be changed.
7. Know what a post-mortem is and why it is used. Post-mortems are reviews of incidents or projects with the goal of improving services or project practices. Incidents are disruptions to services. Major incidents are often the result of two or more failures within a system. Post-mortems help developers better understand application failure modes and learn ways to mitigate risks of similar incidents. Post-mortems are best conducted without assigning blame.
8. Understand that enterprises with large IT operations need enterprise-scale management practices. Large organizations need ways to manage large numbers of software projects, operational systems, and expanding infrastructures. Over time, IT professionals have developed good practices for managing information technology systems at an enterprise level. One of the most comprehensive sets of IT enterprise practices is ITIL.
9. Know why enterprises use business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning. These are ways of preparing for natural or human-made disasters that disrupt an organization’s ability to deliver services. Disaster planning is a component of business continuity planning. Disaster planning includes defining the criteria for declaring a disaster, establishing and switching to a DR environment, and having a plan for restoring normal operations. DR plans should be tested regularly.