The solution architect plays an integral role after the solution's launch in respect of product operability. To handle the increasing user base and product utilization, a solution architect should know how to scale the product to meet demands and ensure high availability without impacting the user experience.
In unforeseen events such as outages, a solution architecture guides you to execute a disaster recovery plan for business process continuation. The solution architect satisfies organization Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RTOs). RPO is how much data loss an organization can tolerate in terms of the volume of data which is lost during the outage interval—for example, a loss of 15 minutes of data. RTO is how much time the system takes to get back up and running again. You will learn more about RTO and RPO in Chapter 12, DevOps and Solution Architecture Framework.
In the event of performance issues due to an increase in demand, the solution architect helps scale the system horizontally to mitigate application bottlenecks or vertically to alleviate database bottlenecks. You will learn more about different scaling mechanisms and self-healing in Chapter 9, Architectural Reliability Considerations.
The solution architect plans to accommodate any new requirements in an existing product that arise from usage patterns, or due to any other reason. They can make changes to non-functional requirements based on monitoring user behavior; for example, users bounce off the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The solution architect works through this and guides the team in handling issues that may occur post-release.
