Technology Agnostic Design

When developing high level design for a solution, it is not a good idea to think about technology choices. We need to keep a gap between design and implementation.

You should not finalize at this point if the solution is going to be build in Java, Python, NodeJS or PHP at this time. For example, you just define that there will be a employee service to provide employee data, but which language will be used to build it, is not part of high level design.

You should take a call what kind of database is well suited, will it be a RDBMS or a document based database, but we should not take a decision which specific vendor’s database we are going to use at this point. For example, we will take a call that we will use RDBMS, but will it be Oracle, mySQL, postgres or some other vendor provided DB, we will decide when we will think about implementation details.

Similarly, all your vendor and technology decisions will not be part of high level design. The details should be filled at a later point, once you have finalized your high level design and made sure you have all the components, services and communications identified.

Why should we not think about technology choices while building high level design? Because it limits our design and solution. Because strengths and weaknesses of a technology becomes strength and weakness of our solution. Because strengths and weaknesses of technologies change over time, hence our architecture should be independent of that.

Once you bring in vendor and technology at a high level design, you commit too much to that. For example say XYZ RDBMS provider is currently the best in market as they provide fastest operations. You design your architecture around that, you use vendor specific data structures and data types. In future, if there is a vendor providing similar services at a cheaper price, we will figure out making a change is very costly as we have to change too much of code. If we would have thought of RDBMS as just a plug and play provide, we could have made this change easily. Infact, keeping our architecture technology agnostic will force us to think beyond a vendor. We will need to think ways of improving our database performance, think of better indexing, sharding, caching, making our architecture robust and independent of technology and vendors.

https://bigmedium.com/ideas/links/managing-technology-agnostic-design-systems.html

https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/09/technology-agnostic-soa

http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/managing-technology-agnostic-design-systems/