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Personal technology radar

Personal technology radar to formalize the thinking about technology and balance opposing decision criteria.

  • ADOPT Best practices for solving particular problems.
  • TRIAL Technologies and techniques worth spending time to understand more deeply.
  • ASSESS: Promising technologies and techniques, but not yet assessed.
  • HOLD: Technologies and techniques to avoid and habits to break.

Methods & Techniques

ADOPT

1

Data Product Canvas

A Data Product Canvas is a visual framework that guides your team through the data product specification. The Data Product Canvas consists of building blocks: domain, data product name, consumer and use sase, data contract, sources, data product architecture, ubiquitous language & classification. https://www.datamesh-architecture.com/data-product-canvas

2

Squad Health Check Model

Squads health checks step back from their day-to-day activities to get a broader perspective on how they are working, with the aim of improving their self-awareness, allowing them to more clearly see improvement opportunities. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/09/squad-health-check-model/

3

Team Canvas

Team Canvas Basic is a strategic framework that helps team members to kick off projects and align on common vision. Based on experience with startups and creative groups, it is made to smoothly start collective projects, let people learn about each other and accumulate enough momentum to get going. https://theteamcanvas.com/

TRIAL

4

Data Product Canvas

A Data Product Canvas is a visual framework that guides your team through the data product specification. The Data Product Canvas consists of building blocks: domain, data product name, consumer and use sase, data contract, sources, data product architecture, ubiquitous language & classification. https://www.datamesh-architecture.com/data-product-canvas

Platforms

ADOPT

5

Apache Spark Streaming

Apache Spark Structured Streaming is an extension of the core Spark API that enables scalable, high-throughput, fault-tolerant stream processing of live data streams. Data can be ingested from many sources like Kafka, Kinesis, or TCP sockets, and can be processed using complex algorithms expressed with high-level functions like map, reduce, join and window. https://spark.apache.org/streaming/

6

Databricks Unity Catalog

Databricks Unity Catalog offers a unified governance layer for data and AI within the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. With Unity Catalog, organizations can seamlessly govern their structured and unstructured data, machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards and files on any cloud or platform. https://www.databricks.com/product/unity-catalog

ASSESS

7

Amazon Redshift Streaming Ingestion

Rather than staging in Amazon S3, streaming ingestion provides low-latency, high-speed ingestion of stream data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka into an Amazon Redshift materialized view. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/materialized-view-streaming-ingestion.html

8

Amazon Verified Permissions

Amazon Verified Permissions is a scalable, fine-grained permissions management and authorization service for custom applications. Verified Permissions enables developers to build secure applications faster by externalizing authorization and centralizing policy management and administration. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/verifiedpermissions/latest/userguide/what-is-avp.html

9

Azure Verified Modules

Azure Verified Modules (AVM) is an initiative to consolidate and set the standards for what a good Infrastructure-as-Code module looks like. Modules will then align to these standards, across languages (Bicep, Terraform etc.) and will then be classified as AVMs and available from their respective language specific registries. https://azure.github.io/Azure-Verified-Modules/

10

Industry Cloud Platforms

Vertical cloud platforms combine software, platform and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities to provide specific solutions for different vertical industries. These industry solutions are mostly based on public cloud services but offer industry players a more agile way to manage workloads and accelerate change against the particular business, data, compliance or other needs of their segment. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-are-industry-cloud-platforms

Tools

ADOPT

11

Apache JMeter

Apache JMeter is a Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, group of servers, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load type. https://jmeter.apache.org

12

ArchUnit

ArchUnit's main focus is to automatically test architecture and coding rules, using any plain Java unit testing framework. ArchUnit can check dependencies between packages and classes, layers and slices, check for cyclic dependencies and more. https://github.com/TNG/ArchUnit

13

JDepend

JDepend traverses Java class and source file directories and generates design quality metrics for each Java package. JDepend allows to automatically measure the quality of a design in terms of its extensibility, reusability, and maintainability to effectively manage and control package dependencies. https://github.com/clarkware/jdepend

14

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. https://www.terraform.io/

TRIAL

15

Infracost

Infracost shows cloud cost estimates and FinOps best practices for Terraform. It lets engineers see a cost breakdown and understand costs before making changes, either in the terminal, VS Code or pull requests. https://github.com/infracost/infracost

16

Poetry

Poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in Python. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you. Poetry offers a lockfile to ensure repeatable installs, and can build your project for distribution. https://python-poetry.org

17

Renovate Bot

Renovate Bot is a dependency update automation tool. It scans software, discovers dependencies, automatically checks to see if an updated version exists, and helps by submitting automated pull requests. https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

ASSESS

18

Steampipe

Steampipe exposes APIs and services as a relational database, giving the ability to write SQL-based queries to explore cloud infrastructure, SaaS, code, logs, and more. https://github.com/turbot/steampipe

HOLD

19

VuePress

VuePress is a minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system and Plugin API, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue’s own sub projects. https://github.com/vuejs/vuepress

Resources

Blog Post «Build Your Own Technology Radar» by Neal Ford

Technology radar: a living document to assess the risks and rewards of existing and nascent technologies. I’ve come to believe technologists need two radars: one as an individual, to help guide career decisions, and one for your employer, to help restore sanity to purchasing decisions and technology direction.

Book «Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach» by Mark Richards & Neal Ford

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of software architecture’s many aspects. Aspiring and existing architects alike will examine architectural characteristics, architectural patterns, component determination, diagramming and presenting architecture, evolutionary architecture, and many other topics.

Zalando Tech Radar

At Zalando, we maintain a public Tech Radar to help our engineering teams align on technology choices. It is based on the pioneering work by ThoughtWorks. This repository contains the code to generate the visualization.