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Author: Scott Duffy

  • March 2018 Changes to 70-532 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-532 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-532 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    Virtual Machines:

    • Ansible
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Availability Zones
    • Claim and Unclaim VMs using DevTest Labs

    Storage:

    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints
    • Azure Files Backup
    • Redis Geo-Replication
    • Azure Search Synonyms

    App Services:

    • App Service Isolated
    • Serverless Applications
    • Distribute Mobile App
    • Mobile App Analytics
    • Collect Crash Data
    • Location Aware Applications

    Kubernetes:

    • Create Container Images
    • Azure Container Registry
    • Docker Hub
    • YAML Application
    • Scale Applications
    • Update Applications
    • Container Monitoring in Log Analytics
    • Development Cluster
    • Configuration Values

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]

  • March 2018 Changes to 70-533 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-533 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-533 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    App Services:

    • All mentions of “web apps” changed to “apps”
    • Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) Workspaces

    Storage:

    • Blob-Level Tiering (Hot, Cool, Archive)
    • Storage Encryption Keys

    Containers:

    • “ACS” changed to “AKS”

    Virtual Networks:

    • Monitor ExpressRoute
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints

    ARM Templates:

    • Configure Lock Policies

    Operations:

    • Implement Serverless Computing, including Azure Functions, Event Grid, and Service Bus
    • IT Service Management Connector (ITSMC)

    Identity:

    • Azure Managed Service Identity
    • Privileged Identity Management
    • Azure AD Identity Management
    • Self-Service Password Reset

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]

  • March 2018 Changes to 70-535 Exam

    March 2018 Changes to 70-535 Exam

    I just received notification that Microsoft has updated the 70-535 exam. The changes took effect March 22, 2018, and the official exam web page just changed this week.

    Here is a summary of new/changed items on the exam:

    Virtual Machines:

    • Azure Batch AI
    • Reserved Instances
    • Design for DevTest Lab
    • Accelerated Networking
    • Azure Backup for Linux
    • Availability Zones

    Serverless:

    • Data Storage for Serverless Computing
    • Azure Event Grid
    • Stream Processing and Bot Messaging

    App Service:

    • Azure App Service Environment (ASE) changed to App Service Isolated

    Compute Intensive:

    • Low Priority Batching and Job Task Counting

    Azure Storage:

    • Azure Data Box
    • Azure Storage Service Encryption

    Relational Database:

    • SQL Data Warehouse Columnar Storage

    NoSQL:

    • Managing Recurring Jobs

    Virtual Networks:

    • Virtual Network Service Endpoints

    Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin

    • Global VNet Peering

    Security:

    • Service Tags

    Media Service:

    • File-Based Encoding or Azure Media Analytics

    Monitoring:

    • TCP Connections

    Operations Automation:

    • Update Management Strategy

    Are you interested in being notified when there are new exam changes? Or when I have new free videos on new features of Azure? Sign up to my list and I’ll send you occasional emails on it.

    [thrive_leads id=’6447′]

  • New Azure UI: Create App Service Plan

    New Azure UI: Create App Service Plan

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    I noticed that Azure rolled out a new User Interface for choosing an App Service plan while creating a new App Service today. It’s a big improvement to the “lots of scrolling” that it used to require.

    Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    In this video, I show you how to create a Windows Web App in Microsoft Azure. Windows Web App. We go through the Azure Portal, and see how form fields get filled in. If you can’t afford to create resources in Azure, but want to see how it’s done in 2018, this is the video for you.

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

    Transcript:

    Hi there! This is Scott Duffy from SoftwareArchitect.ca. In this video, I want to show you a brand new user interface that Microsoft Azure just rolled out for the Azure App Services, specifically around selecting plans. Switching over to the Azure portal, you can see the usual create web app selections. You give it a name, pick your subscription, put it in a resource group. We do have, now, a docker option between Windows, Linux, and Docker in terms of choosing the operating system. But more significantly, when you go to choose the app service plan, you can create a new plan, give it a name, a location, and when you choose the pricing you get a whole new way of choosing the app service plan. You can see there are three tabs along the top. One is for Dev/Test, one is for Production, and one is for Isolated. Selecting any of them brings up plans that are only related to those scenarios.

    Under Dev/Test, you can see there’s three recommendations, but when I say, “See Additional Options,” there are two additional basic plans. I’ve got the free plan. That hasn’t gone away. We’ve got the D plan, which is shared infrastructure, extremely cheap at almost 1.5 cents per hour. Up to the basic plan, which is 10, 18, and 36 cents per hour in Canadian dollars.

    When I switch over to the Production side, I can see all the additional features that come with it. Now the thing I like about this is it’s way less scrolling. In the old interface when I would go to select app service plan, there were all the plans laid out. There were taking up 1/9th of the screen each and so I had to scroll quite a bit to get to the basic or free or standard plans. This way, I basically get to filter off my scenario right off the top.

    It also has pulled out the features. Instead of listing each feature under each plan, the features are listed on the bottom here. This is pretty cool. It’s a brand-new interface for selecting plans. Kudos to Microsoft and the Azure team. I think this makes it a lot clearer in terms of what you’re selecting and I’m not a huge fan of just all text and not very much icons. Not very much graphics. But it does convey a lot of information. I can see the progression from 12 cents, to 24 cents, to 48 cents, to 97 cents per hour. It makes it very easy.

    I’m going to select the premium plan for this example, but anyways, I wanted to point out there’s a brand-new interface. Still pretty simple. We’ll get into the Docker web apps at some future video, but the web app interface is changed and I like it.

  • Quickstart: Deploy an App to Azure Service Fabric

    Quickstart: Deploy an App to Azure Service Fabric

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    Azure Service Fabric is a new way of deploying applications into the cloud using microservices. You package and upload your applications to the Service Fabric, and Azure takes care of ensuring it’s using the resources of the cluster of servers it’s deployed on to.

    In this video, I show you how to create a service fabric cluster, and deploy a sample application to it using Visual Studio 2017.

    Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    In this video, I show you how to create a Windows Web App in Microsoft Azure. Windows Web App. We go through the Azure Portal, and see how form fields get filled in. If you can’t afford to create resources in Azure, but want to see how it’s done in 2018, this is the video for you.

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

    Transcript:

    Well hi there, this is Scott Duffy. In this video we’re going to set up a service fabric cluster from scratch within the Azure portal. We’re going to use Visual Studio 2017 to deploy the service fabric application into it. So we’ve got a lot to do here, so let’s get into it.

    So just so that you know, I’m going to be using the community edition of Visual Studio. The Visual Studio 2017 is downloadable free version of the Visual Studio IDE. You do need to prepare your environment by having the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric SDK. So if you just Google Microsoft Azure Service Fabric SDK, you can get to a page like this where you can download it and install the SDK.

    We go into Microsoft Azure and we choose a service fabric cluster type from the marketplace. I’m going to say “create”. Now you give it a name; so I’m going to say AZ service fabric cluster and my initials. You’ll see here that it’s fully qualified, so it has to be unique. We get choice of operating system, there’s a couple of Linux versions and there’s a bunch of Windows versions. So I’m just going to pick the default which is the 2016 data center with containers. We have to enter user ID and password, so give me one second for that. We have to create a user resource group, since service fabric does create seven or eight different resources. I’m going to create a brand new resource group for that, and we give it a location.

    The fundamental part of service fabric is you can have one, two, or three node types, and you have a quantity of nodes within each type. So we just need one node type for this example. We’re going to configure the required settings. I’m going to call this a basic node; there’s a very limited naming up to nine characters for the node type. I don’t need durability for this. Selecting the m size, I’m just going to take the smallest recommended size because this is only going to live for a couple of hours. Now we do have the option when we’re testing to try this single node cluster, but in this case I’m going to create a five node cluster. We do need to enable reverse proxy in order for the Visual Studio to be able to connect to this. So I’m going to say okay. Then I’m also going to say okay to that.

    We do need to use a security key, so the security key is used for the publishing from Visual Studio. You are going to create a key, and you’re going to have to choose your key vault and give the certificate a name. When you click the okay button it’s going to go off and create a key and then you can download that key.

    I’ve actually gone through this process already. I’m going to close out of this, and we’re going to go back to the home page. I’ve got a service fabric up and running that I just did a few minutes ago before starting this video. So the key to this, this is a three node fabric, not the five that I was trying to create before. But you’ll see here, you’ll see my nodes … It deployed successfully. Everything is up and running. I need to copy the client connection endpoint, because that is important. Let’s switch over to Visual Studio and we can see about this sample application that we’re going to be using.

    Now for the code, I’m not going to create anything from scratch. I’ve chosen from the Azure samples GitHub repository, the service fabric dot net getting started sample. So download this and go into Visual Studio with it. This is Visual Studio, this is the code. This is deployment, but this is the package that comes with it. There’s a lot of different applications, web services, stateful and stateless, actor, et cetera. We’re going to go into the getting started application. We’re going to build it. Make sure that it builds on your local first, obviously. It builds on mine. Then I’m going to say “publish”. Now the key here is to put the correct connection endpoint that we took from the portal here into the connection endpoint. The other key is that we have to install the key that we downloaded from the Azure portal. So if I go into my documents here, I downloaded the key from the Azure portal. Let’s look at it within the key vault.

    So I have the key that I downloaded from Azure. I can click “install” and I want to make sure that it’s installed as a machine certificate into my personal certificate store, so you can see here that it is installed as a machine certificate. We’ll see that with a restarted Visual Studio that the connection endpoint is accepted, there’s a green check mark. If I was to click the publish link, which I will do, it will build this solution and will start to publishing into the service fabric cluster. So that’s going to take a few minutes actually, so let’s pause the video and we’ll come back when it’s deployed.

    So just watching the deployment about to finish up here. I can see that it’s now deploying of the individual projects within this file. So we can see that this web service is ready. The publication succeeded. That took just over one minute to deploy.

    Now if you go into the portal, you’ll see there’s this service fabric explorer. If you’re able to get into there, then you’ll see that … Look at that. We have our getting started application deployed into our three node service fabric. Yeah, Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric is now managing the running of this application, distributing it within the three nodes. If we were to start to hammer the performance of one of these, it would then distribute more services to make up for it.

    That’s pretty much what I wanted to show you. This is a creation and a deployment of a service fabric app into the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric. If you like this video, let me know. If you have questions, of course, let me know. Thanks.

  • Quickstart Series: Cosmos DB + MongoDB in Azure

    Quickstart Series: Cosmos DB + MongoDB in Azure

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    In this video, I show you how to create a MongoDB Databased in Microsoft Azure using Cosmos DB. The data is stored in CosmosDB, but the MongoDB API is compatible with the standard MongoDB API, and so you can migrate your data into CosmosDB and simply point your apps at it without coding changes.

    I’ll show you how easy it is to create a MongoDB in Azure.

    Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    In this video, I show you how to create a Windows Web App in Microsoft Azure. Windows Web App. We go through the Azure Portal, and see how form fields get filled in. If you can’t afford to create resources in Azure, but want to see how it’s done in 2018, this is the video for you.

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

    Transcript:

    Hi there, this is Scott Duffy of SoftwareArchitect.ca. In today’s quick start video, we’re going to go and create ourselves a MongoDB database using the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB service. Now, in case you’re not aware, Cosmos DB is a relatively new service within Microsoft Azure that contains many different types of data models. It is actually a globally distributed, multi-model database service. What that means is that you can create, very quickly and actually cheaply, your data in the cloud, in many different regions of the world. It is scalable, it is guaranteed low latency, and you can choose from the key value model, or document DB model, or graph API model, or column-value model. It’s got a whole range of consistency models for you to choose from.

    Microsoft offers comprehensive service level agreements, so that you’ll know exactly how much up time the application has, and how quickly you expect the application to respond. It is a database for the modern way of developing apps, contains many different languages that it can connect to, so in this video, we’re going to go into the Azure portal and we’re going to create ourselves a MongoDB database.

    So I’m in the Azure portal, that is http://portal.Azure.com, and I want to create a Cosmos DB. So I go into the creator resource, and you’ll see all the options. Now, the Cosmos DB is actually right off of the getting started tab, so you can see it right off this first screen, but if I really wanted to get MongoDB, I could do a search for it. Now I’ll be given options for running MongoDB as a hosted instance within a virtual machine. Bitnami has some images. There’s also containers, if you like the docker model, but we’re looking for, Microsoft has the database as a service for MongoDB.

    Now this is actually Cosmos DB. They’ve just given it another label, so that it comes up on a search for MongoDB. I’m going to close out of this, go back to the marketplace getting started tab, and go into the Cosmos DB from there. Now we have to give it a name. It has to be unique, globally unique. You see the fully qualified domain name as “.documents” Azure.com. So I’ve pre-chosen a unique ID here, and it’s unique across all of Azure. The first big question is the API. Now Cosmos DB comes with a number of API compatibilities to access the data inside, and the one that we’re curious about is Mongo DB. Okay, so you can access things like a table, which is a key value pair, the famous no sequel database Cassandra. There’s also a SQL compatible API that returns JSON, and Graph API.

    But what we want to do is go to Mongo DB. We’ve got our subscription, now you could have the free account, or you could be on a free trial, or MSDN subscription. This is my own subscription. I’m going to put these into a resource group. I’ll use the same ID as the Cosmos DB. Pick one of the regions, now I believe Cosmos DB is supported through all of Microsoft’s regions, so you’ll see a lot of options from Europe, North America, South America, Australia, et cetera. I’ll just choose the default.

    Geo-redundancy, this allows my data to be created in West US and East US, and I can add other regions later, so this is so that if there’s a disaster, it adds to the availability of your solution. Now the new security feature here is to configure virtual networks, and if you do this, this allows you to restrict access. So instead of your Cosmos DB having a public URL, you still need, of course, security to access it, but if you just wanted to block off access to it, you could configure this to a virtual network, and only other machines on the virtual network on the subnet can use the Cosmos DB. So if you have an application on Azure, and you want to create a Cosmos DB only for that application, you can enable this, but I will leave it disabled.

    Pin to dashboard, and I will click create. Now that did take a few minutes, but Microsoft Azure did come back and create me a new Cosmos DB account. You can see here that I selected geo-redundancy, so I have the primary database in the western US, but there is a readable location in the eastern US, and I can get the connection strings and start using it as a Mongo DB database. This is, again, an alternative to hosting MongoDB yourself, in your own data center. You can use Cosmos DB using a MongoDB API. If I go under the quick start tab of the settings, it actually gives me some sample code I can pull in the connection string into .NET, or if I am a Python developer or Node.JS, et cetera, there’s other ways of getting it. It gives me my user ID and password for the connection string, so using Azure for your MongoDB needs is as quick and easy as this video.

  • Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    Here’s some brand new content from the SoftwareArchitect.ca YouTube channel that you might find interesting.

    In this video, I show you how to create a Windows Web App in Microsoft Azure. Windows Web App. We go through the Azure Portal, and see how form fields get filled in. If you can’t afford to create resources in Azure, but want to see how it’s done in 2018, this is the video for you. Or if you want to see me do it and follow along yourself.

    Quickstart Series: Windows Web App in Azure

    In this video, I show you how to create a Windows Web App in Microsoft Azure. Windows Web App. We go through the Azure Portal, and see how form fields get filled in. If you can’t afford to create resources in Azure, but want to see how it’s done in 2018, this is the video for you.

    Or you can see the video directly on YouTube.

    Transcript:

    Well hi there, my name is Scott Duffy, from softwarearchitect.ca, more than 80,000 students have chosen to learn topics such as Microsoft Azure from me. I am super appreciative of that. In this video, we’re going to do a quick start, which means we’re going to go into the Microsoft Azure portal and we’re going to create a Windows web app, which is part of the app services using Microsoft Azure I’m going to show you how easy it is to get a Windows web app up and going, so that you can deploy your custom code into it.

    Let’s switch over to the portal. The URL is portal.azure.com. This is the Microsoft Azure portal. I’m going to go over to the plus sign. Now we have a number of categories, one of them is Web + Mobile and web app is the first option of the web and mobile category. It’s also under Getting Started, there’s the third one down. If we choose it we’re going to be brought into the settings tab and we’re going to start to create our Windows web app.

    Give it a name. I’m going to call it Windows Web App. Now you’ll see this is a fully qualified domain name in that it’s got the .azurewebsites.net. I’m going to be able to access this over the web, based on this URL. I’m going to use my existing subscription, you may have a free plan or a MST subscription, or your corporation or visual studio. I use pay as you go. This charges me every month. Can’t use the word Windows in the resource group, that’s a new one. Thank you. The resource group is a way of organizing your resources. For web apps this is fairly straight forward, you’re just going to create the web app, you can create one resource group that contains many web apps. But for virtual machines and networks and other things you may want to have multiple resources grouped under one name.

    We’re going to create a new resource group for this. Now I do have the choice between Windows and Linux. This video is about a Windows web app and so we’re going to choose Windows. Now we do have the choice of where this Windows web app is going to get deployed. The Windows web app is by default going to go into the South Central US, which is one that I chose. I have an existing web app which is the free plan. Let me show you the pricing options and we can choose. Let’s create a asjdwebapp. We can reuse the same names on multiple different things and Azure will take care of it, as long as it’s not the same type.

    I can put this in any of Azure’s 40 plus regions. I’m going to choose East US 2 and let’s look at the pricing options. Microsoft’s offering you the ability to run your Windows web app on isolated hardware, that means there’s no other person or tenant using this hardware and so you’re paying for that privilege for a one core, two core, four core isolated hardware, you’re getting 300 to $12,000 a month. This includes your networking and such like that, that becomes a lot faster. The premium service is still pretty good. You will pray for this, but this includes slots and traffic manager, custom domains, based on this type of pricing. We can see here that there’s a V2 option as well as the V1 option. The V2 options actually a bit cheaper, plus you get more memory so it’s hard to know why you would want to choose the old one unless all of your other web apps are running on this and you want the consistency.

    Then we go down to the standard plan, you don’t get the same number of slots and there’s less instances and less storage and stuff like that, down to the basic plan where you get almost nothing. You can’t have traffic manager, you can’t have deployment slots, and they do also have a free plan. And a shared plan even for as low as $11 a month. You have a lot of different options depending on your needs. I’m just going to choose the S1 plan. It’s a standard plan, gives me all the cool things but I don’t need the performance just yet because we’re just testing out.

    I’m going to choose the S1 standard plan instead of the free plan that my other app is running on. Now that’s it, it’s a one page set of settings. This is going to create me a web app. I’m going to pin this to my dashboard and click Create. Now the thing about web apps is that you create them and they’re empty. So you actually do need to deploy code. If you’ve got Microsoft Visual Studio, you can connect Visual Studio using the Azure plugin and then deploy your applications directly into this web app. One click, you click Publish and it will do that. This is going to take … It’s very quick to create a web app because it’s not like a virtual machine where it has to create networks and NIC cards and all these sort of things. It’s going to create this for me fairly quickly and then I can customize it.

    That was quite quick, my web app is already created. We can see on this over view screen, the URL of our web app. I’ve got FTP user name and I can FTP into the site and deploy my site using FTP. If I go down to application settings I can see that I can choose a .NET Framework version, PHP version, Python version, a Java if I want to install. These things are not installed by default. 32 bit verses 64 bit. This is where all of your settings are when you deploy your app. You get all these extra things such as SSL, custom domains, Azure to manager your backups. You can do a backup type of job.

    Here’s how you create an Azure Windows web app. Let me know how that goes for you.

  • 70-532 Frequently Asked Questions for Microsoft Azure Certification

    70-532 Frequently Asked Questions for Microsoft Azure Certification

    I’ve been creating new videos for my YouTube channel. 

    Here’s a playlist of frequently asked questions that I put together for the Microsoft Azure 70-532 exam. If it’s something you’re interested in, please have a look. And don’t forget to subscribe.

  • Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Approach in TOGAF

    Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Approach in TOGAF

    Within the TOGAF specification, you will sometimes read about there being two options for approaching the design of architecture: a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach.

    But what does that mean?

    ​The top-down approach means that you start with the business requirements (the B layer) and fully decide the problems your business needs to solve before thinking about the technology to solve those problems. The “bottom up” approach means you start with the technology that you are looking to add to your organization and work “up” to change the applications and the business.

    An example of this is, let’s say you have a problem with security. You talk to the business leaders, department heads, etc and come up with an extensive target business architecture for it. Then you start looking at vendors and thinking about implementation. That’s top-down.

    The bottom-up approach is, when you have a problem with security, talking to the technical teams and ops teams. What can you do to improve security? They might suggest you restrict all access from outside your company except through the VPN. You then work up to the business layer to say that certain policies need to be followed to get access to the company network from outside. That’s a top up approach. Thinking about solutions first and then changing the business needs to match.

    Hope that helps.

     

  • How Do Software Architects Make Decisions?

    How Do Software Architects Make Decisions?

    A student asked me a question in my Introduction to Software Architecture course, and I decided to write a bit of a longer answer than usual. So I posted it here. 🙂

     

    How and When Architect decide which technologies to go with?

    I would like to know How and When an Architect decides which technology to go with? If he/she is not having in-depth tech knowledge, how to decide if selected technology is capable of catering the need

     

    Well, that is a big question of course. This course went over the role of a software architect at a high level, but a more practical question is how to decide between two or more options when faced with a tough decision.

     

    So let’s look at a scenario with real products, and figure out which we would like to buy.

     

    Scenario: You know you need to buy a piece of software, but how do you choose which piece of software is best?

     

    You have to go and find a marketing solution. You did your research, and the choices are… IBM Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Yes, four massive companies have named their product the same thing.

     

    So how do you choose which one to go with?

     

    Usually, the way companies do this, is come up with their requirements (part of a RFP). They make a list of features that the product they choose must have, and a list of nice to have features, against which products will be judged against.

     

    In my case, I want a marketing cloud that has the following features, must have:

    • Rock solid security
    • Intelligent folder structure for projects to support all my clients without risk of overlap (multi-tenant)
    • Fine control over which users get access to which clients
    • Proven ability to send high volume of emails
    • Detailed and reliable reporting and tracking features
    • Email automations, funnels
    • Schedule emails
    • Pre-stored templates
    • Customer support by the vendor
    • Cost per user

     

    My nice-to-have features are the following:

    • Can host standalone web pages
    • Support multiple languages for the same email
    • Handle unsubscribes with customizable pages
    • Future roadmap

     

    So you make your lists of features that you’d like to see.

     

    Now for each application, you need to “grade” the application on a score of 1-10 against each of the features.

     

    On a scale of 1-10, how great is the security? Does it integrate with your Active Directory? Can you block IP address ranges? Does is do threat detection and ensure to raise an alert if hackers attempt to get in?

     

    Some applications only do the basics, while others have security features you haven’t even thought of.

     

    You go down the list, and evaluate the software on each feature. If an application doesn’t support something on your must-have list, that’s a big problem. A 0, and possible elimination from contention unless you’re willing to modify your requirements.

     

    Now add up the scores under the must-haves and nice-to-haves.

     

    There will be applications that have a low score compared to the others, and that puts them at the bottom of the list. There will be applications have have a high score compared to others, and that puts them at the top. Easy enough, right?

     

    Now how do you choose between two applications where the scores are similar?

     

    Well if they meet the requirements, and the price is within your budget, it might just come down to picking the one you feel will suit you best. Which one had sales teams that replied to your questions the fastest? Which one has the best reputation for support online? Do you already have this company’s other products in your organization?

     

    There’s no perfect solution. Every architect has experienced the case where you start down the path of choosing one vendor, and then you learn that they don’t support something basic. Or things don’t got as easily as you planned. Such is life sometimes.

     

    But if you start with your requirements, and grading applications based on your requirements, you’ll have “the facts” in front of you on which you can make a decision.