Being an architect at the IBM Garage
Many of you have probably heard about the IBM Garage Methodology and how, focusing first on business outcomes, it has helped many companies to quickly deliver innovative solutions.
By enabling cross-disciplinary teams to envision new ideas and rapidly co-create tangible MVPs (minimum viable products), Garage squads help to accelerate digital transformation thanks to design thinking, lean startup, extreme programing and DevOps practices mastered by Garage designers, architects, developers and data scientists.
A lot of excellent materials already exist about IBM Garage, how to learn about the Garage Methodology, about customer success stories and more…
But I’d like, in this article, to focus on architectures and how the Garage Architects are essential building successful MVPs; for example, blending knowledge and hands-on practice related to public clouds and on-premise infrastructure to design cloud native applications based on microservices architecture deployed on OpenShift/Kubernetes clusters, or dealing with integration and application modernization requirements, not to mention experiences with automation and AI.
Don’t get me wrong, every role is super critical to the success of an MVP implementation — product owner, designer, cloud engineers / full-stack developers, platforms or software specialists, data scientists and even SRE are equally important here!
A Garage architect can come from various backgrounds such as senior application developers or architects, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure specialists, experts on data and AI or IoT solutions, to name a few. Being curious, open minded, biased to action and having good communication capabilities are the critical skills to be successful in this role.
In return, learning something new almost every day and working in a small dynamic team brings a lot of fun in this exciting time of the hybrid cloud and open AI era.
So let’s discuss some of the activities lead by Garage architects by using a concrete example related to enabling new business opportunities for a solution provider through application modernization.
Let’s consider a lead offering manager, Michel, working for this solution provider specialized in preventive maintenance. Michel knows his customers very well, the market trends in his business, and the core value proposition of his company. The core value proposition is mostly coming from smart analytics built over the years by a team of deep experts which identify potential signal of future failure on rotating machines, leveraging significant amount of data collected from this machines in real time. Michel decides to partner with the IBM Garage to co-create an MVP to expand the value proposition of his offering and learn the Garage Methodology to determine if it will help them modernize and innovate more successfully and rapidly.
As part of a business framing workshop of few hours, a Garage architect, Gabriel, paired with a designer, engage with Michel on how to increase the value proposition of the solution. This session prioritizes the most important functional use cases including:
- The ability to expose APIs to better integrate the preventive maintenance solution with enterprise systems
- Enable a new end-user experience with ability to “dialog” with the solution to get aggregated status on a set of machines monitored by the solution and then be able to drill down into specific dashboards as well as historical data
- Support various business models with a SaaS shared offering as well as ability to deploy dedicated instances on the customer’s preferred cloud provider
Gabriel, the Garage architect, then organized and led a technical discovery workshop with Michel and his technical team to:
- Better understand the “as is” solution: brainstorm how to make it future proof as it was built on an aging Microsoft Windows client/server framework
- Understand and define the various interfaces of the “to be” solution including: messages received from data collection devices sensing the rotating machines, API exposed to customer, user interface of the solution Virtual assistant & dashboards, ability to invoke new machine learning algorithms running
- Validate the ability to re-use the existing analytics by refactoring them into dedicated micro-services
- Identify the key non-functional requirements related to security, performances, availability & scalability of the future solution
This session concluded with the definition of a preliminary scope and context for a potential MVP to be created as a first step towards a production version of the solution selecting a particular wind farm with an initial group of wind turbines to be monitored with this “to be” MVP.
A few weeks later, a team composed of Gabriel and the designer, developers and data scientists from IBM, the customer (Michel), and his preferred development contractor was assembled to start delivering the MVP.
The Garage architect Gabriel first contributed to a Design Thinking workshop led by the Garage designer to define the key functions of the MVP focusing on the best possible user experience, injecting new ideas to define a compelling solution, as well as providing valuable insights when assessing the complexity to implement specific functions during prioritization.
She then led an architecture workshop to define the architecture, components and cloud services of the MVP, the technologies (IoT services, time series databases, AI services, programming languages…) to be used by the development team. In this particular case, a microservices architecture based on containerized workload deployed as pods on Kubernetes orchestrator was chosen to enable deployments on various Kubernetes managed services as well as on Red Hat OpenShift. The choice of IBM Cloud devOps toolchain with the definition of the initial automation steps to build, test, and deploy the solution were also made during this workshop.
During the MVP build-up phase, Gabriel participated in the daily standups and worked with the lead developer to address some technical choices and issues as well as to refine some of the technical design points and refactoring aspects of the MVP.
Finally, she also started to drill down on some of the non-functional requirements and future needs of the production-grade solution to anticipate the scale-up of the solution after the first MVP, assuming its technical and commercial success.
With one foot in the business, one foot in the technology, two hands and a brain deep in the clouds, IBM Garage architects increase their experiences and skills on how to deliver tangible value every day by co-creating hybrid and open AI solutions with our customers and other Garage squad members.
An IBM Garage architect is an ideal role to become a recognized cloud expert and a trusted technical leader. IBM is expanding IBM Garage and is hiring Garage Architects as well as many other Garage roles across the world. To learn more about available jobs, go to: ibm.com/employment/garage/
