Software Architecture: The Hard Parts

Static coupling Represents how static dependencies resolve within the architecture via contracts. These dependencies include operating system, frameworks, and/or libraries delivered via transitive dependency management, and any other operational requirement to allow the quantum to operate.

The authors built many distributed systems a few decades ago when they first became popular, yet decision making in modern microservices seems more difficult, and we wanted to figure out why. We eventually realized that, back in the early days of distributed architecture, we mostly still persisted data in a single relational database. However, in m

Often, the best design an architect can create is the least worst collection of trade-offs—no single architecture characteristics excels as it would alone, but the balance of all the competing architecture characteristics promote project success.

static coupling analyzes operational dependencies, and dynamic coupling analyzes communication dependencies.

An architect implements fitness functions to build protections around unexpected change in architecture characteristics. In the Agile software development world, developers implement unit, functional, and user acceptance tests to validate different dimensions of the domain design. However, until now, no similar mechanism existed to validate the arc

Each understands the common scope under question: architects understand the coupling characteristics, developers understand the scope of behavior, and the operations team understands the deployable characteristics.

Building services that model bounded contexts required a subtle but important change to the way architects designed distributed systems because now transactionality is a first-class architectural concern. In many of the distributed systems architects designed prior to microservices, event handlers typically connected to a single relational database

High static coupling implies that the elements inside the architecture quantum are tightly wired together, which is really an aspect of contracts.

All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison. Paracelsus