Special Interest Group - Architecture as Code

[rocketstack-matt]

Please note that only FINOS members can propose new projects. If you're interested in membership, see https://www.finos.org/membership-benefits#become-a-member.

Business Problem

Firms across the Finance Industry have an obligation to have robust Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) & Change Implementation Management (CIM) practices that ensure changes to software which is the foundation of their business do not cause instability for their employees, clients or other market participants. What’s more, effective SDLC and CIM controls can enable firms to move faster more safely, driving innovation, reducing cost, mitigating risk and attracting top engineering talent into the industry through the ability to focus on business problems rather than software development barriers.

However, whilst most organisations have strong, well-defined processes and controls around the development and deployment of code, design and architecture tends to encompass a wide variety of techniques and disparate practices even within a single organisation, with no common industry standard for describing system architectures. Most commonly architecture is captured in a combination of non-interrogatable formats which tend to go stale as system state over time drifts from the agreed architecture.

The ability to codify how system architectures are defined would create numerous opportunities to innovate and drive both controls and automations, such as:

• Mapping proposed architecture and architectural changes to pre-approved architecture blueprints.
• Tracking architectural drift.
• Ability to interrogate system architectures to identify commonalities or disparities of approach, technology choices and deployment frameworks.
• Drive down cost through identification of common technology platforms to solve common business patterns.
• Increase automation as standard architectural patterns could be mapped to IasC technologies from inception.
• Reduce barriers to vendor software deployment.

Proposed Solution

There are two main trends in software architecture space:

• Various industry participants have been tending towards technologies such as C4 to provide a common framework to describe elements of their systems, although this tends to be sporadic and focused primarily on driving diagrams form code rather than enabling further innovation opportunities.
• Several tools to manually capture and track Enterprise Architecture information such as Waltz have been created, but tend to operate in parallel to the software development lifecycle itself, missing an opportunity to reduce friction for capturing data.

It is proposed that the formation of a Special Interest Group (SIG) would allow for participants across the industry to collaborate on common design and architecture problems and constraints and produce one or more proposals for processes, techniques and technologies that would help drive standard practices around codifying architecture, interchanging architectural model data and driving automation.

This SIG would be of particular interest to any organisation developing or deploying custom technology across their organisations, third party software vendors and consultancies who would be able to share patterns, problems and opportunities with the aim of reducing the cost and risk of developing and deploying software, increasing capacity to focus on genuine business differentiating problem-solving.

Current State

• Initial discussion with FINOS CTO @maoo.
• SIG proposal submitted.

2023-05-16

• Presented the AasC concept to the Automated Change Deployment WG
  • @ashukla13 recommended starting as a WG within the DevOps Automation SIG to get moving early. @rocketstack-matt to present at the DevOps Automation SIG Meeting, May 18th
  • @mcleo-d recommended presenting the SIG at the FINOS Open House

2023-05-18

• Proposed forming a new Working Group under DevOps Automation SIG at their meeting on May 18th
• @rocketstack-matt will join the DevOps SIG as a co-lead.
• @yt-ms and @rocketstack-matt will join a round table at the June 15th members meeting to discuss the topic and raise awareness for contribution

Existing Materials

• Architecture as code: The key to cloud success
• AaC (Architecture as Code Github project)
• Structurizr C4 DSL

SIG Maintainers

Name	Email Address	FINOS Member	GitHub Profile
Yan Tordoff	yan.tordoff@morganstanley.com	Morgan Stanley	@yt-ms
Matthew Bain	matthew.bain@morganstanley.com	Morgan Stanley	@rocketstack-matt

SIG Contribution and Onboarding process (v. 1.0, last updated on October 27, 2020)

Below is the list of tasks that FINOS Team and the contribution author goes through in order to complete the FINOS SIG onboarding process. Please do not edit these contents at contribution time!

Voting (SIG Lead and FINOS ED)

• [ ] Contribution author triggers community socialization to gauge interest - recommended emailing issue link to community@finos.org
• [ ] If there's positive response from the Community, prepare short SIG proposal deck for the FINOS Governing Board. You can start from this template or see a previous SIG example)
• [ ] Assign issue to Executive Director (@mindthegab) to trigger vote
• [ ] Executive Director brings SIG to the Board for additional socialization and approval
• [ ] FINOS board accepts the SIG (and the onboarding process can move forward)

Identify project meta (Lead: FINOS SIG POC, Support: FINOS Marketing)

• [ ] Identify and Assign FINOS SIG POC
• [ ] Link to SIG approval resolution - // public link to board resolution
• [ ] SIG Name
  • [ ] Assess current trademark status
  • [ ] Define new SIG name (if applicable)
  • [ ] Design new SIG logo (if applicable)
  • [ ] Trademark new SIG name and logo (if applicable)
• [ ] Category and sub-category (for FINOS Landscape)
• [ ] Existing content/assets or new Github repository
• [ ] Team composition: lead maintainer and other maintainers
• [ ] Meetings? (existing/yes/no)
• [ ] Meeting minutes, agenda, attendance tracking (existing/yes/no)
• [ ] Documentation website (existing/yes/no)
• [ ] Define SIG slug : Dependant on Define new SIG name

Project Communication Channel(s)

• [ ] Ask maintainers which communications channels they'd like to use and if more than one are needed. These may include
  • [ ] Creation of one or more project mailing lists (e.g. general@, or dev@ and users@)
  • [ ] Creation of one or more Slack or Symphony chats for the project
• [ ] Create the identified communication channels during infra set up
• [ ] Link communication channels linked front and center in the project README.md.

Repository transfer (Lead: FINOS Infra)

• [ ] Check GitHub repository transfer requirements:
  • [ ] finos-admin has Admin to all repositories to transfer
  • [ ] finos-admin is allowed to transfer repositories out of the org
  • [ ] if the repository is owned by a user (and not an org), the user must be able to transfer the repository to finos-admin
• [ ] Transfer all assets as GitHub repositories under github.com/finos
• [ ] Invite GitHub usernames to GitHub FINOS Org
• [ ] Create <sig-name>-maintainers GitHub team and invite users
• [ ] Configure finos-admins and finos-staff team permissions

Infra setup (Lead: FINOS Infra)

• [ ] Update SIG badge
• [ ] Update SIG README
• [ ] Enable meeting attendance tracking (optional)

Metadata update (Lead: FINOS Infra)

• [ ] Add SIG to metadata
• [ ] Add identities, orgs and affiliations to metadata
• [ ] Add logo to FINOS landscape
• [ ] Add SIG Leads emails to finos-project-maintainers@finos.org list
• [ ] Add SIG Leads GitHub usernames to the project-maintainers Team

Update FINOS SIG Roster

• [ ] FINOS Governance

Announcement (Lead: FINOS POC)

• [ ] Work with FINOS marketing to send out announcement to announce@finos.org , checkout announcement template at the Contribution page.
• [ ] Notify FINOS POC and FINOS marketing manager once the announcement has been sent out (FINOS infra)

Press Release (OPTIONAL) (Lead: FINOS POC)

• [ ] Identify quotes for press release
• [ ] Draft press release
• [ ] Send embargoed press release to reporters
• [ ] Coordinate social media promotion of the press release with FINOS marketing
  • [ ] Post on FINOS social media
  • [ ] Post on LF social media

Onboarding and training

• [ ] FINOS SIG Governance
• [ ] FINOS Project Lifecycle
• [ ] ODP Training

Contributors Metadata (Lead: FINOS SIG POC, Support: FINOS infra)

• [ ] For each SIG material contributor identified in the previous step, collect: the following info:
  • Fullname
  • GitHub username
  • Corporate email address
• [ ] Identify other existing contributors (assuming there's a contribution history (eg Git history)

[TheJuanAndOnly99]

Thanks for your contribution @rocketstack-matt! We'll get back to you in the following days with next steps.

[davidwatkins73]

Hi @rocketstack-matt / @yt-ms / @maoo

I'm one of the finos/waltz maintainers and keen to get involved with this SIG. It was great to hear the discussions at the recent FINOS event. Do you have some idea of timelines when this group may up and running ?

/dw

[rocketstack-matt]

Hi @davidwatkins73 , thanks for reaching out . . . as a first step we've agreed to start as a Working Group as part of the existing Devops-Automation SIG.

I'm updating a few of the docs in that SIG space and will be setting up regular meetings in the next week.

[davidwatkins73]

Wonderful! Thanks for the update

[rocketstack-matt]

Just to give an update @davidwatkins73 we're planning on the first Working Group being 11AM EST on Tuesday 25th July, this will take the place of the second monthly Automated Change Deployment Working Group that is currently in the calendar.

I'm just waiting on a new microsite for the SIG being deployed by FINOS then I will post a further update pointing to that which will have all the details.

[TheJuanAndOnly99]

Architecture as code was accepted as a working group of the devops automation. Closing this issue for now.