There are many ways to design a solution, sometimes there are bigger challenges and sometimes there are small challenges or pain points or configuration challenges that customer is facing. To design a complete solution, designer should consider all the aspects of the current situation and apart from assessing the current situation, one should also consider the long term requirements and usage of that solution. Once all the aspects and issues/concerns/short term planning/long term planning has been considered, then think about the target solution that will fit into the customer requirements and meet the customer challenges and pain points and that too ensure the optimizations like technical optimization or the cost optimizations should also be considered in to the solution design.
While considering the target solution, some of the additional factors that also need to be considered is that compatibility of the new solution into the existing environment, who will manage the solution, who will perform the changes and handle the incidents of the solution.
While everything has been decided, then one has to ensure that is the target solution meeting the customer service level requirements or not, in case still there are gaps, then solution design has to be reconsidered to incorporate the customer service level requirements so that target solution should deliver the expected services to customer or its clients.
Another major challenge that is being faced while designing the target solution is that, customer budget. While designing the target solution, it has to be ensured that the target solution costing is within the customer budget, else that will be a road block in delivering the solution to customer. To ensure that the solution is meeting the customer budget, ensure the solution components are cost optimized from all the aspects.
Here is the summary on how to be a good solution designer:
- Understand the customer current situation
- Understand the customer pain points and challenges.
- Understand the customer long term and short term goals and strategy planning
- Understand the customer budget to be spent on the project
Based on the above inputs
- Draw the current situation and confirm the same with customer.
- Plan the target reference architecture
- Discuss the target architecture with customer for any amendments
- Ensure the solution is in the customer budget.
- Present the complete solution to customer.
One can refer AWS reference architectures to sample solutions to create effective solution for the customer.
Also one can also refer to the AWS well architected program to ensure that solution that is being presented to the customer is optimized from the various aspects like cost, performance, security etc.
I hope above guidelines help fellow solution designers to consider the aspects while design a cloud solution for the customer.
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