Architectural Building Blocks

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rfoley85
Posts: 6
Joined: 05 Oct 2012, 11:19

Hello,

can you provide me with an understanding on how you would represent an Technical Architecture Building Block within Essential 3.4. Any help with this matter would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
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neil.walsh
Posts: 444
Joined: 16 Feb 2009, 13:45
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Hi Richard,

Can you expand upon what you mean by a Technical Architecture Building Block in this context. This will help us provide a more relevant answer to your question.

Are you thinking along the lines of configurations of particular technology products, types of technology (technology components) or something else?

Look forward to hearing back from you

Thanks

Neil
rfoley85
Posts: 6
Joined: 05 Oct 2012, 11:19

Hello,

What I am looking for is the ability for the Architecture group to set standard architecture technical patterns or building blocks. so when a solution architect is building out their logical design that they are able just select these standard building blocks that are stored within Essential. to promote re-use and standardization of architecture designs.

example would be such things as a enterprise database farm at logical level or something along those lines.

I am thinking about when the architect is building out the application provider to technical linkages.

Thanks,
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks for this.

In terms of defining those building blocks, we can define these at two levels of abstraction for technology things and then re-use these to describe the technology platforms for the Application Providers.

These two levels are both in the logical layer:

- Technology Composite which defines a collection of Technology Components and the relationships / dependencies between them in the context of this composite. Note that Technology Composites can be used as building blocks in other Technology Composites, and we use the Technology Component Architectures to describe what's in each of these Composites. What this means is that that building blocks can be as course grain or fine grain as we need.

- Technology Product Build, which defines a collection of Technology Products and the relationships and dependencies between those Products in the context of this build. Just like the Composites, the Technology Product Builds can be re-used by as many Application Deployments as we need. We had the concept of standard builds in mind when we designed this part of the Technology Layer.

To understand when we should be using a particular build or not, we can use the Technology Provider Role classes to link the Technology Composite and the Technology Product Build and in this relationship define the Lifecycle Status that indicates whether this is our standard production build, something we should use only for pilot implementations or if such as use is off-strategy.

I thought it might be useful to mention that in the next update of the Essential Meta Model, we have enhanced the ability to do standards management across the business, application, information and technology concepts. The pattern we're using is already in EMM 3.0.4 for the Information and Data Standards and this approach will be available shortly to Technology things too, including the ability to link Application Services to the relevant standards for Technology Provider Roles.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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