22 May 2023
We need a more nuanced understanding of how to get the best out of monoliths, microservices, and serverless architectures.
9 February 2023
The potential benefits of an architecture based on serverless functions are nuanced, making it a good fit only for some very specific use cases.
12 December 2020
Data Vault 2.0 modelling can support a more agile approach to data warehouse design and data ingestion. Inevitably, this flexibility does come with a heavy burden of complexity.
17 October 2020
Designing good architecture is only half the battle. You also need to be able to communicate your architecture to anybody who is likely to use it.
13 June 2020
One of the more pervasive myths in software development is that naming things is hard.
8 February 2020
Message design in an event-driven architecture can be quite nuanced, especially if you want to achieve any of the benefits of loose coupling that they can be associated with.
14 December 2019
Enterprise messaging patterns are complex beasts that often warrant a common implementation across your endpoints. Should you ever be tempted to roll your own?
6 October 2019
The problem of shared databases is not confined to monolithic systems. A big store of shared state is the guilty secret lurking in many a microservice architecture.
6 January 2019
When you are identifying service boundaries, it’s not enough to consider the domain model alone. There are other, more pragmatic concerns to bear in mind.
27 November 2018
ArchUnit is a java library that provides a fluent API for creating self-testing architectures via unit tests. A similar library can be written for .Net Standard that acts on compiled assemblies rather than raw code.
12 October 2018
Event-driven integration can improve the scalability, resilience and scalability of distributed applications… but this does depend on the design of your event messages…
12 August 2018
Twelve factor apps provide a methodology for building apps that are optimised for modern cloud environments. It’s only been achievable in the Microsoft world since the advent of .Net Core.
29 July 2018
It’s easy to get caught up in unrealistic notions that you can re-write a legacy system or gradually decompose it. There are other, more pragmatic approaches that can help to modernise architectures and enable new development.
18 June 2018
Fitness functions can be a useful metaphor for guiding an emerging architecture, but you do have to invest in making sure they describe the right outcome.
3 June 2018
Not only are layered applications difficult to maintain, but the common abstractions they are built on tend to give rise to inflexible implementations that have serious scalability challenges.