Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Tradeoff Analysis for Distributed Architectures

Description

There are no easy decisions in software architecture. Instead, there are many hard parts--difficult problems or issues with no best practices--that force you to choose among various compromises. With this book, you'll learn how to think critically about the trade-offs involved with distributed architectures. Architecture veterans and practicing consultants Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, and Zhamak Dehghani discuss strategies for choosing an appropriate architecture. By interweaving a story about a fictional group of technology professionals--the Sysops Squad--they examine everything from how to determine service granularity, manage workflows and orchestration, manage and decouple contracts, and manage distributed transactions to how to optimize operational characteristics, such as scalability, elasticity, and performance. By focusing on commonly asked questions, this book provides techniques to help you discover and weigh the trade-offs as you confront the issues you face as an architect. Analyze trade-offs and effectively document your decisions Make better decisions regarding service granularity Understand the complexities of breaking apart monolithic applications Manage and decouple contracts between services Handle data in a highly distributed architecture Learn patterns to manage workflow and transactions when breaking apart applications Review: o'reilly publishing sucks. I wish authors self-published. I would buy that instead. - o'reilly publishing sucks. I wish authors self-published. I would buy that instead. Review: Excellent Patterns and Analysis Techniques for Microservice Architectures - This is a great book! It is a sequel to the authors' prior book, "Fundamentals of Software Architecture" (which isn't a prerequisite to this book, but is helpful). I liked that book. This one is way better. Where the first book stayed fairly high level and abstract, and focused on working as an architect in a company, this book is all about actual tough architecture decisions in practice. It applies some of the the first book's approaches and patterns (and a whole bunch of new ones) towards a fictional example application which a dev team is tasked to completely refactor. Basically, the book is structured as a narrative about a team breaking down a faulty outdated monolithic application into a modern microservices-based architecture. Each chapter essentially compares different aspects of how a monolithic architecture might have been written to do something in the past, then how a modern microservice architecture could do the same thing today. Along the way the authors offer terrific advice and approaches for effective tradeoff analysis (and countless suggestions and tips) that you can use when refactoring a large monolith app (or when building microservices from scratch), detailing at every level how you might sort out a tangled mess of dependencies into a clean microservices stack - from shared code libs/components/modules, to shared database tables and schemas, to various network concerns, etc. There is nearly no code (it's not an implementation book), but the descriptions of each example scenario, pattern, diagram, and everything around it are extensive and detailed. The authors don't actually offer any definitive "best practice" in any of the scenarios they consider, but rather present all the pros and cons of each approach you might consider - which all together support their overall thesis that there are no right or wrong answers in architecture, only tradeoffs to weigh and consider for any given design challenge and possible architectural solution. I give this book my highest recommendation - it's a winner.