KirkKnoernschild
Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.
No single architectural style solves all needs. Though microservices have taken the developer community by storm recently, they are not always the optimal solution. In some cases, a more monolithic architecture may be more suitable short term. Fortunately, proven architectural practices allow you to build software that transcends specific architectural alternatives and develop a software system that gives the development team the agility to shift between different architectural styles without undergoing a time-consuming, costly, and resource intensive refactoring effort. Modularity is the cornerstone of these alternatives.
Software development is an amazing profession, requiring the delicate combination of analytical and creative skills. Understanding architectural patterns, agile best practices, and exploring the depths of platforms, tool, and languages requires deep analytical skills. Yet crafting a system also requires vision and understanding when to deviate from traditional best practices.
Monoliths are out and microservices are in. Not so fast. Many of the benefits attributed uniquely to microservices are actually a byproduct of other architectural paradigms with modularity at their core.
In today’s volatile technology and business climate, big architecture up front is not sustainable. Attempts to define the architectural vision for a system early in the development lifecycle does not work. To accept change, teams are moving to agile methods, but agile methods provide little architectural guidance. In this session, we provide practical guidance for software architecture on agile projects.
The architecture paradigms we’re using are changing. The platforms we deploy our software to are changing. We are confronted with several new architecture paradigms to choose from, such as microservices and miniservices. Should we automatically discard some of the proven architectures we’ve used in the past, including more traditional web services? Likewise, new platforms, such as cloud, complicate the decision. Yet, at the heart of this transformation is modularity. From monoliths to microservices and everything in between, modularity is the foundation.
Zero fluff.