I had exactly this discussion today in an architectural discussion about an infrastructure extension today. As our newest team member noted, we planned to follow the reference architecture of a system in some places, and chose not to follow the reference architecture in other places.
And this led to a really good discussion pulling the reference architecture of this system apart and understanding what it optimizes for (resilience and fault tolerance), what it sacrifices (cost, number of systems to maintain) and what we need. And yes, following the reference architecture in one place and breaking it in another place makes sense.
And I think that understanding the different options, as well as the optimization goals setting them apart, allows you to make a more informed decision and allows you to make a stronger argument why this is a good decision. In fact, understanding the optimization criteria someone cares about allows you to avoid losing them in topics they neither understand nor care about.
For example, our CEO will not understand the technical details why the reference architecture is resilient, or why other choices are less resilient. And he would be annoyed about his time being wasted if you tried. But he is currently very aware of customer impacts due to outages. And like this, we can offer a very good argument to invest money in one place for resilience, and why we can save money in other places without risking a customer impact.
We sometimes follow rules, and in other situations, we might not.
Yes, and it is the engineering experience/skill to know when to follow the "rules" of the reference architecture, and when you're better off breaking them, that's the entire thing that makes someone a senior engineer/manager/architect whatever your company calls it.
And this led to a really good discussion pulling the reference architecture of this system apart and understanding what it optimizes for (resilience and fault tolerance), what it sacrifices (cost, number of systems to maintain) and what we need. And yes, following the reference architecture in one place and breaking it in another place makes sense.
And I think that understanding the different options, as well as the optimization goals setting them apart, allows you to make a more informed decision and allows you to make a stronger argument why this is a good decision. In fact, understanding the optimization criteria someone cares about allows you to avoid losing them in topics they neither understand nor care about.
For example, our CEO will not understand the technical details why the reference architecture is resilient, or why other choices are less resilient. And he would be annoyed about his time being wasted if you tried. But he is currently very aware of customer impacts due to outages. And like this, we can offer a very good argument to invest money in one place for resilience, and why we can save money in other places without risking a customer impact.
We sometimes follow rules, and in other situations, we might not.