The Concept of Architecture as a Service in 2024

We live in a generation of rapidly changing technological development. Nowadays, it’s impossible to imagine a successful business without a solid software infrastructure. 

As a result, more and more organizations and companies all over the world are facing the ultimate need to go digital and adopt innovations and high-end software to increase their efforts and keep growing. 

Whether it's software or any kind of structure, an architect plays a major role in designing a solution that meets your needs for the future. Architecture is more of an art rather than science.

If your company is product based but requires significant customization and implementation effort for specific customers then the “Solutions Architect” role is needed.

In this blog, we will explain what a solutions architect is, what are the benefits of architecture as a service, as well as why having a solution architect is critical for organizations and projects. 

What is an Architecture as a Service/AaaS or Solution Architect?

An architect is one of the most significant and client-facing roles in the IT industry. Its importance is nonetheless often overlooked or even completely ignored by companies at both ends.  

The services that an architect typically provides include concept design development, preparation of construction documents, and construction administration. Architects also provide a wide variety of additional services including architectural programming and project management.

An architect is responsible for translating the vision for the project to the development team and plays a pivotal part throughout the entire systems development lifecycle. They are also involved in future updates to the solution.

A solution is a way to describe an answer to a problem, however, in the corporate world, a solution means evaluating a client's needs or problems and addressing them with systems that replace or improve what already exists.

Solutions architecture requires both technical and interpersonal skills to design, describe, and manage solutions. Having an absolute vision for the project and a clear understanding of the client’s business needs, a solutions architect plans the parts that will constitute the software solution and how they are going to work together.  

One of the main reasons why a company should consult architecture as a service is to successfully design and develop new technology solutions that align with its business needs, as well as fill in the communication gap between technical and non-technical experts involved in an IT project.

As the process is always heavy on the budget and highly risky, every company should have an architect to implement new solutions and scale them successfully. This expert can be introduced to a company’s enterprise structure through software architecture consulting services.

Benefits of Architecture as a Service -

Cost-Effectiveness: AaaS doesn’t need a full-time salary and benefits package, making it a more budget-friendly option for businesses, especially for short-term projects.

Scalability: Companies can balance their architectural resources as per their project requirements. This is particularly useful for businesses with uncertain workloads.

Access to Expertise: AaaS providers often have a pool of architects with different skill sets and experience across different technologies and industries. This allows companies to have specialized knowledge that might not be readily available in-house.

Faster Time to Market: With an architect readily available, companies can accelerate the design phase of their projects, leading to faster product launches and deployments.

Improved Project Outcomes: Experienced architects can help identify potential challenges early on, ensuring projects are designed with scalability, security, and maintainability in mind.

Solutions Architect: Skills and Experience

To successfully design, create, and lead the development of a software solution, an architect needs to have a certain skill set. Let’s take a closer look at the most important skills of a solutions architect below.

Higher Communication

Being able to communicate effectively with stakeholders, project managers, developers, and software vendors involved in the software development services are important for a solutions architect. As an architect has a central role in any project and leads every team on it, ineffective communication can lead to big barriers. So, an architect should be able to clearly explain, understand everyone’s point of view, listen, advise, and influence. 

Project and Resource Management

Though solutions architects are not directly involved in project development, they still need to ensure that project resources are being used efficiently and impactfully. 

They should be business-minded and capable of identifying the most effective solution at every turn for every part of the architecture. 

It is their responsibility to focus on business goals, including hiring new people, and understand how to achieve them in the set timeline and within the given budget. 

Complete Analysis

Software architecture and systems integrated into it are numerous details that work together. An architect needs to be very attentive to those details, as overlooking something may hold the development process, lead to breakdowns, or make the software solution inefficient. They also should be able to understand the technical specifications of many different software solutions and hardware and perform analysis of different business layers. 

Architects are also responsible for the project context from the very beginning to the current moment. They need to remember all the details of the projects and ideas to validate and approve them on time.

Risk Identification and Management

An architect must be capable of analyzing and identifying potential short and long-term risks that may cause technical issues and disrupt business operations in the future.

Technical Expertise

Commonly, the role of a solutions architect requires technical education and hands-on experience across all major areas of the software development process, as well as hardware engineering expertise.

Thus, a solutions architect should have at least 6 to 8 years of experience in several  areas like Business analysis, IT infrastructure, Software architecture design, Cloud development & DevOps.

Solutions Architect Certification

One crucial thing related to the IT solutions architect is their certifications required to approve their skills and qualifications. The certifications are aimed at checking out the overall knowledge, abilities, and experience of specialists.

There is a wide variety of certification platforms available that offer training, providing various learning materials, tests to practice the knowledge, etc. However, the exam can be taken without any previous preparation in case a professional has a deep understanding of the architecture principles along with great experience in the IT industry. 

There are different certifications available for IT solutions architects. Some of the most popular ones are AWS Solution Architect Certification, Azure Solutions Architect Certification, Google Cloud Architect Certification, ITIL Certification, etc.

When do you need an Architecture as a Service?

When it comes to building from scratch, changing, or upgrading your software solution – the earlier, the better. 

At the ideation stage. A solution architect plays a vital role in creating and implementing software architectures that both meet the client’s business requirements and make software or the entire infrastructure function at its top capacity and efficiency. For this reason, an architect should be consulted for the project right from the very beginning, before the designing and development processes even begin. This specialist analyzes and estimates the initial requirements, evaluates the technical aspect of the future project, makes the specifications clear, communicates with stakeholders, and more to make sure the client receives the most efficient solution.

When creating an MVP or PoC to present to your investors. A solution architect suggests the most efficient set of tools and technologies according to the budget. Also, this specialist will help to translate the complicated technical language into the one that is clear and understandable to the investors who operate in business.

When starting the development process. Not only designing the architecture, a solutions architect needs to make sure the entire development team fully understands the requirements and their tasks. Moreover, an architect needs to do everything in their expertise and power to lead the product-building process and make it as smooth as possible. The position of an architect is highly demanding and requires an extensive set of knowledge and expertise in multiple IT-related fields.