[vbezhenar]

I'm not sure that I'd qualify as a software architect. I work in a small software company and basically I do all important IT decisions. I'm kind of architect and full stack developer and devops at the same time.

So sometimes we do some design meetings. I suggest how to better design database, etc. I'm trying not to dictate everything but rather catch mistakes which are obvious from my experience. Avoiding mistake early is very important IMO.

Recent months I designed Kubernetes cluster. We have plenty of small and medium services and environments thrown around in a few dedicated servers. It's a giant mess. I dread when I need to untangle it. So it was unavoidable to redesign devops from the scratch and I decided to go with Kubernetes. I basically tried few approaches, some turned out to be too complex, e.g. I built a complete automation on terraform, shell scripts and flux and ditched it out, because nobody but me would understand it and I don't need that kind of job security. I ended up with a simplest setup possible. Terraform provisions servers (we use hoster with OpenStack), then I manually run kubeadm with prepared configs, then I run few shell scripts to install important stuff with helm, then I install our services with kustomize. I think it was very nice outcome. Simple and approachable for everyone who knows basics of Kubernetes. Not full-fledged GitOps, but I decided that we're not ready for it yet. That was one example of project that I did myself because we didn't have necessary expertise.

Right now I'm adapting our projects to work with Kubernetes, improving builds, adding health checks, writing yams, etc.

I also made a foundation for some important core projects which I couldn't trust others to design. Then people continued my work. It seems to work fine so far, I oversee those projects to keep them in a good condition.

Also I chat a lot with developers who stumble upon hard issues and struggle to resolve those or they can't make some decision.

And I have some vision how our system as a whole should look like in an ideal world. We don't have resource to implement that vision and probably never will, but I consider it a good direction so I'm trying to point important decisions to that direction.

Also I sometimes walk over repositories and fix stuff I don't like. Usually devops stuff, like bad dockerfiles, missing dockerignores, outdated dependencies.

Sometimes I feel like a janitor, LoL.

[doctor_eval]

The thing is that in computing, the “janitor” stuff is the hardest, and needs to be done by the best people. Keeping things clean is really tough, and only people who understand what “clean and simple” means, can do it.

Outside of actual system design and writing code, I have spent a huge amount of my time over the last few years doing things like setting up CI/CD, E2E testing, writing templates, etc. Because it’s really hard to get this right, to have a vision for how things should be.

My point is that it sounds like you’re doing an awesome job. I’m sure you qualify as a software architect.