Neal Ford

Mark Richards

Pramod Sadalage

Zhamak Dehghani

Architects are often harried because they have no clean, easy decisions: everything is an awful tradeoff between two or more less than perfect alternatives. These are the difficult problems architects face, what this book's authors call "the hard parts." These topics have no best practices, forcing architects to understand various tradeoffs to succeed. This book discusses these hard parts by not only investigating what makes architecture so difficult, but also by providing proven ways to address these problems and make them easier. The book explores topics such as choosing an appropriate architecture, deciding on service granularity, managing workflows and orchestration, managing and decoupling contracts, managing distributed transactions, and optimizing operational characteristics such as scalability, elasticity, and performance. As practicing consultants, the authors focus on questions they commonly hear architects ask and provide techniques that enable them to discover the tradeoffs necessary to answer these questions.

Modern Tradeoff Analysis for Distributed Architectures

Software Architecture: the Hard Parts

Patrick Kua

Rebecca Parsons

The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.

Building Evolutionary Architectures

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

Pramod Sadalage

Books

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