Products
Overview
In technology, a "product" typically refers to a collection of business capabilities provided by a group of similar services, resources, and data to provide value to a defined group of users.
Software is generally easier to visualize as products, as many applications include a user interface or a tangible output allowing users to interact directly with the capabilities of a product. While that interface may be the only visible component, it often takes the work of multiple processes working together to deliver that capability to the user. By themselves, these processes may or may not provide the capabilities sought by the consuming user, and visualizing them as a cohesive product allows for better organization and understanding of an organization's technology assets.
At Scaled Sense, we feel it's important that our definition of a product includes not only software but also data and infrastructure workloads. Similar to software, these workloads typically comprise multiple systems that work together to deliver capabilities to users. Ensuring our definition includes these workload types is essential to us in recognizing the comprehensive nature of modern technological solutions.
In the Scaled Sense platform, a Product is likely one of the first things you'll see and create. The representation of your organization in Scaled Sense will be created along with an Organization Management product that includes Services for administering the Organization, such as governance assets and shared templates to facilitate continuous integration and deployment.
Scaled Sense works to organize Services co-located in the same Product in several ways. For example, Services co-located in the same Product will be categorized together by naming convention. In addition, Product Roles enabled for the Product are inherited to all Services within that Product, which are translated to security groups for your provisioned workloads.
As you review and plan your usage of Scaled Sense to manage your organization, visualize how the Services in the organization are interacted with and start to group them together based on capabilities and usage.
Best Practices
There is no one right way to organize Services and Products within an organization. To help you get started, we've provided a few example scenarios. If you're still not sure, or would like to discuss your unique organization - we'd love to hear from you!
Shared Services
Many of the Infrastructure Workloads provided by Scaled Sense support the linking of multiple Functional Workloads. This allows for the option of aggregating those cross-cutting concerns to a singular set of resources for ease of administration. A common pattern in Scaled Sense is to define a Shared Services Product to include one or more of the Infrastructure Workloads that are intended to be shared by multiple Products and teams.
Microservice Applications
Multiple microservice applications that work together to deliver a shared set of capabilities are great candidates for defining a Product in Scaled Sense.
Monolithic Applications
Monolithic applications, while singular, deliver a set of capabilities and make a great candidate for defining a Product in Scaled Sense.
Data Integrations
Data Integrations that collect, process and provide a common set of data make a great candidate to group together in a Product in Scaled Sense.
Associations
Products represent the building block for organizing Services into groupings based on capabilities and ownership. Its associations to other resources within the platform are shown and described below:
Product Roles
In your Scaled Sense Organization, the Organization Owner has the capability to create Product Roles that should represent the job roles within the organization. These roles may not be required for every Product in the organization, and Scaled Sense allows for the ability to enable the required roles that apply to each Product.
Services
Services in the Scaled Sense platform are organized into a single Product. Once a Service is assigned to a Product, it cannot be moved as the combination of Product and Service naming defines the naming conventions for your provisioned resources. That said, recreating a Service in a new Product should not be a large undertaking. With the platform, a new Service can be ready in minutes and assets can be moved to the new location.