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Defining Technology Providers

4 min

Technology Providers are used to describe how our high-level, logical component architecture is realised in the Technology Layer. This tutorial introduces Technology Providers and describes how they are defined in Essential Architecture Manager.

Purpose

A Technology Provider is an abstract construct covering Technology Products and architectures of Technology Products, which we call Technology Product Builds. Defining a Product or a Product Build is a similar activity except that we do not normally capture the architecture of a Technology Product.

Technology Provider is an abstract class, which means that you do not create instances of Technology Provider, directly in the Essential Meta Model. Rather, instances of the sub-classes are created but can be treated in the same way by other classes in the meta-model when required.

Technology Providers are those things that implement the Technology Components. They are either Products (that you can buy, download, etc.) or they are configurations of other products in particular technical architectures – in which case they are called Technology Product Builds

Technology Products have roles they perform in your organisation, so we define what we are using that technology to do (leveraging technology components) by using the role.

Technology Products, like Technology Components, can offer a set of functions that describe in more detail specific operations that the product can do. These are used in dynamic architectures that capture the dependencies that exist in the behaviour of these functions.

TIP: As previously stated, you typically don't need to define the functions, but may do if you are looking at technology at a low level of granularity.

Tasks

Technology Products are defined as followed:

  • Select the supplier of the product, e.g. Microsoft

  • Give the product a name and description e.g. Azure Functions

  • Define the Technology Product Roles the product is performing using the ‘Implements Technology Components’ slot (see Define Technology Product Role)

  • If required, select the Technology Product Functions that are offered by this product

  • Complete the remaining fields as required

Here, we have created the 'definition' of the Technology Provider – we can also create a Technology Product Build and use it, e.g. in other architectures. To describe how a Build is put together, we create its Defining Technology Product Build Architecture

Updated 31 October 2023

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