Any software solution revolves around the collection and management of data. Take the example of an e-commerce website; the software application is built to showcase product data on the website and encourage the customers to buy them. It starts by collecting customer data when they create a login, adding a payment method, store order transactions, and maintaining inventory data as the product gets sold. Another example is a banking application, which is about storing customer financial information and handling all financial transaction data with integrity and consistency. For any application, the most important thing is to handle, store, and secure data appropriately.
In the previous section, you have learned about different kinds of data types, along with the storage needs, which should help you to apply data thinking in your design. Solution design is heavily influenced by data and enables you to apply the right design-driven solution by keeping data in mind. While designing a solution, if your application needs ultra-low latency, then you need to use cache storage such as Redis and Memcached. If your website needs to improve its page load time with an attractive high-quality image, then you need to use a content distribution network such as Amazon CloudFront or Akamai to store data near the user location. Similarly, to improve your application performance, you need to understand if your database will be read-heavy (such as a blog website) or write-heavy (such as survey collection) and plan your design accordingly.
It's not just application design, but operational maintenance and business decisions all revolves around data. You need to add monitoring capabilities to make sure that your application, and in turn, your business, is running without any issues. For application monitoring, you collect log data from the server and create a dashboard to visualize the metrics.
Continuous data monitoring and sending alerts in the case of issues helps you to recover quickly from failure, by triggering the auto-healing mechanism. From a business perspective, collecting sales data helps you to run a marketing campaign to increase the overall business revenue. Analyzing review sentiments data helps to improve the customer experience and retain more customers, which is critical for any business. Collecting overall order data and feeding to the machine learning algorithm helps you to forecast future growth and maintains the desired inventory.
As a solution architect, you are not only thinking about application design, but also about overall business value proposition. It's about other factors around the application, which can help to increase customer satisfaction and maximize the return on your investment. Data is gold and getting insights into data can make a tremendous difference to an organization's profitability.