factor10 Solution Designer

Field notes

Operations

Operations is not a separate phase that begins once development is done. It is part of the solution's design. Where the components run, who owns them and how they communicate drives total cost, attack surface, regulatory risk and how fast an incident can be fixed. Capturing the operations picture early and explicitly makes it a consequence of deliberate choices, rather than of default settings and improvisation.

Describe the runtime environment: databases, buckets, servers, buses and the like, and which vendor and region each one lives in. Be clear about managed versus self-hosted, and what transport security applies between the components.

Performance and sizing requirements can be described here. That information is usually useful when you are requesting quotes from vendors.

Cost per node is described here too. It is compiled and used on the Summary tab to calculate the total operating cost.

 

Things to consider

• Managed or self-hosted: managed reduces the operational burden but
  increases vendor lock-in. Decide deliberately per node.
• Geography: region drives latency, redundancy, regulatory conditions (GDPR)
  and pricing. State it explicitly per component.
• Transport security: TLS between components, mTLS where it is justified,
  VPC peering or private endpoints for internal traffic. Do not assume the
  defaults are enough.
• Backup and DR: what is the backup cadence for each persistent component,
  where are the backups stored, and how is the system restored?

 

Further reading

• Humble, J. & Farley, D. Continuous Delivery (2010)
• Forsgren, N., Humble, J. & Kim, G. Accelerate (2018)