Planning guide
Prepare for an architecture review.
Use these prompts to describe what you know and flag what you need help deciding. You can start a conversation before you have every answer.
Review the six promptsStarting outline
Six prompts to get started.
Use the prompts that matter to your situation. Keep the outline non-sensitive; broad workload groups and constraints are enough.
What needs to run?
Describe the applications, workload groups, users, and intended outcome. Note the availability or performance requirements that matter.
Where is the boundary?
Identify the data, identities, locations, connections, retention rules, and permitted paths the environment must account for.
What resources are required?
Outline compute, accelerators, memory, storage, networking, topology, scale, and resilience. Flag unknowns for review.
What depends on what?
Map the applications, services, identities, networks, and storage systems that rely on one another and the state they require.
Who controls the environment?
Describe who may administer, observe, approve, restrict, isolate, support, and audit the environment and its connections.
How will it change?
Identify responsibilities for deployment, observation, change, backup, recovery, support, acceptance, and retirement.
Design discussion
What the first conversation explores.
Discuss platform fit, identify open questions, and consider the next design decisions. These three areas help organize that conversation.
- Platform fit
- Which supported platform, deployment shape, resource topology, and integrations fit the workload?
- Boundary and control
- Which identities, administrative paths, connections, provider access, and approvals belong in the design?
- Operations and acceptance
- How should responsibilities, observation, change, recovery, support, and acceptance criteria be defined?