2.9 Functional architecture
Your functional architecture assembles a finished design. It answers the question, “exactly how will we build our product?”
Introduction
Defining your functional architecture is the last step in the Blueprinting phase. In a way, it’s all about “buttoning up” the architecture you’ve been creating up to this point — it should feel good, kind of like wrapping up all the artifacts we’ve defined and putting a pretty bow on it before we begin the next phase, Delivery.
The previous three activities defined our North Star. Just to recap, your North Star consists of:
Your target state architecture. This is largely embodied in your service catalog. It tells us what tools and technologies we can use.
Your architectural foundation. This is your top-level blueprint, a guide that your team can use to determine where all the pieces go and how they connect with each other.
Your delivery processes and tools. These make up your “ways of working,” which means how you build and deliver software, your delivery pipeline tooling and control processes.
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Up to this point, we haven’t locked in specific technologies — we’ve chosen design patterns (such as “event streaming”), but have avoided exact implementations (for instance, choosing “Kafka”). There’s been a good reason for this: we want our North Star to establish a long-term vision, a largely immutable foundational architecture. The North Star artifacts purposely don’t identify specific implementations for the following reasons:
We’ve created a general, high-level design. It should be conceptual to keep the design pure. Kafka is a very specific thing that can be used for an event stream, but it has certain limitations. Our design should remain pure, clearly specifying our design specification: an event stream.
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