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At Starfish, the High-Level Design (HLD) is a crucial component of our Transformation services. This HLD process has been honed and proven over decades of collective experience to provide customers with a design artifact that ensures certainty of outcome.
Although the customer deliverable is a document, perhaps more important is the thinking required to create the document. This is when the architect rectifies flaws and identifies opportunities for optimisation. The entire process is also collaborative and the customer provided with early visibility of the document to allow for review and remediation.
Obvious though it may seem, the purpose of the HLD is to document key design decisions and provide a narrative to justify them. For example, the HLD would typically capture the BoM, along with why a certain vendor and product was selected. It will also layout the high-level topology without detailed addressing information, which will be provided in the Low-Level Design (LLD) and provide details on which protocols will be used.
Depend on the customer and scale of the project, Starfish will typically deliver the HLD as either PowerPoint presentation or a .PDF document, along with a spreadsheet for the Bill of Materials. A typical HLD breakdown would include the following sections.
✅ Requirements: Mapping of requirements to functionality within the design.
✅ Physical Design: Justification of vendor and product selection, along with physical topology diagrams.
✅ Logical Design: Capture of all Layer 2, Layer 3, VPN and QoS protocols and capabilities that will be used.
✅ Security Design: Narrative to describe how security will be achieved at both a macro and micro segmentation level.
✅ Other: Document any other considerations such as SDN, management, logging, or analytics.
If you think this service can help you or would like to learn more, get in touch on info@starfishlabs.io