Thinking Like an Architect

Gregor Hohpe, an Enterprise Strategist for AWS, has an interesting series of posts entitled “Thinking Like An Architect”. Part one discusses how building architects can start with just a sketch, which nevertheless contains the essence of the final building. He noted that Frank O. Gehry’s initial sketch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, looked like the image above. I can certainly see the essence in the final product:

How that relates to software architecture is what Hohpe explains here:

To eliminate the noise, you need to know what constitutes the essence. And that’s not much different from the ability to abstract - which turns out to be one of the major skills that architects should possess!

He then offers up one of his own IT sketches, to illustrate:

“…this sketch shares one approach to achieving hybrid cloud by pulling a common abstraction like Kubernetes over the respective environments,” he writes.

Thought-provoking post. Time to start writing on a napkin more!