Frequently Asked Questions: Software Architecture Design
How do you help us choose the right cloud provider?
We evaluate cloud providers against your specific requirements: compliance needs (data residency, certifications), existing team skills, cost projections at your scale, managed service availability, and vendor lock-in risks. The decision is documented in an ADR with clear rationale. Multi-cloud and hybrid strategies are considered where appropriate.
What's included in the HA/DR strategy?
We define RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) based on business requirements. The strategy includes: multi-AZ or multi-region deployment patterns, database replication and failover, backup strategies with tested restore procedures, and documented runbooks for disaster scenarios.
How do you ensure the architecture meets compliance requirements?
We map architecture components to compliance controls (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA as needed). This includes data flow documentation, encryption requirements, audit logging specifications, and access control patterns. Compliance requirements become explicit NFRs with acceptance criteria.
What do we get for ongoing operations?
Beyond architecture diagrams, you receive: Infrastructure-as-Code templates (Terraform/Pulumi), CI/CD pipeline configurations, observability setup (dashboards, alerts), operational runbooks, and capacity planning guidelines. Your team can deploy and operate from day one.
How do you validate the architecture before we build?
We validate through: Proof-of-Concept implementations for critical paths, load testing against the capacity model, threat modeling sessions with your security team, and architecture review workshops. Risks and mitigations are documented before implementation begins.
How are costs estimated and optimized?
We build a TCO model including: compute, storage, networking, managed services, and operational overhead. The model projects costs at different scale scenarios. We identify cost optimization opportunities: reserved instances, spot capacity, right-sizing, and architectural patterns that reduce cloud spend.