In this chapter, you learned about the definition of solution architecture from both the industry standards and in a more simplified way. You learned the importance of solution architecture, and how it can help the organization to achieve a more significant result and maximize the return on its investments. This chapter helped you to understand the benefits of having a solution architecture, and how it helps in different aspects of solution design and implementation.

In summary, solution architecture is a building block in a complex organization and is used to address all stakeholder's needs and establish a standard in order to fill the gap between business requirements and technical solutions. A good solution architecture not only addresses functional requirements but also puts long-term thought into, and takes care of, non-functional requirements such as scalability, performance, resiliency, high availability, disaster recovery, and so on. Solution architecture finds an optimal solution to accommodate the constraints of cost, resources, timelines, security, and compliance.

Later in the chapter, you learned about the basics of cloud computing, solution architecture in the cloud environment, and about significant public cloud providers and their service offerings. This also helped you to gain a high-level overview of different cloud computing models, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and the cloud computing deployment models in the public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. Finally, this chapter sheld some light on the evolution of solution architecture design.

In the next chapter, you will learn all about the solution architecture role – the different types of solution architect, the role's responsibilities as regards solution architecture, and how they fit into an organizational structure and an agile environment.