Software architects have no clean, easy decisions: everything is a terrible trade-off. Architecture has lots of difficult problems, which this platform-agnostic class highlights by investigating what makes architecture so hard. This class goes beyond the fundamentals of software architecture and focuses on really hard problems within distributed architectures such as microservices and event-driven systems.

This class is divided into 2 main parts—pulling things apart, then putting them back together again. In part 1 (pulling things apart), you’ll learn about the differences between modularity and granularity, techniques and patterns for breaking apart monolithic systems and migrating them to a distributed architecture, how to choose the right size for a service, and how to break apart monolithic data. However, once you break a system apart, necessarily you need to put it back together again. That’s what part 2 is about – putting things back together.

In part 2 you’ll learn about communication protocols for communicating between services, how to reconnect distributed data, whether your workflow should use orchestration or choreography, what sort of contract you should have between services, what patterns to use for complex event processing, and how to manage distributed transactions while still maintaining some level of data consistency and integrity.

Software architecture is full of hard parts. By attending this 2-day class you can gain the insights and techniques to make it just a little softer.

Course contents

Part 1: Pulling Things Apart

Unit 1: Architectural Modularity

Why migrate from monolithic systems?
Business and technical drivers
Migration patterns and approaches
Hands-on exercises: Migration drivers

Unit 2: Architectural Quantum

Defining a quantum
Why this is important
Application partitioning
Quantum examples
Hands-on exercises: Identifying architectural quanta

Unit 3: Technical vs. Domain Partitioning

Technically partitioned architectures
Conway’s Law
Dynamically partitioned architectures
Inverse Conway maneuver
Advantages and disadvantages of each
Architecture and organizational alignment
Migrating from technical to domain partitioning
Hands-on exercises: Identifying partitioning

Unit 4: Component-Based Decomposition

Microservices migration patterns
Identifying and sizing components
Flattening components
Identifying component dependencies
Creating component domains
Creating domain services
Domain service decomposition
Hands-on exercises: Flattening components

Unit 5: Service Granularity

Granularity disintegration drivers
Granularity integration drivers
Analyzing tradeoffs
Hands-on exercises: Determining service granularity

Unit 6: Breaking Apart Monolithic Data

Drivers for data decomposition
Creating Data domains
Resolving data dependencies
Hands-on exercises: Decomposing monolithic databases

Part 2: Putting Things Back Together

Unit 7: Data Access and Ownership

Creating bounded contexts
Managing common data ownership
Managing joint data ownership
Data Access patterns
Hands-on exercises: Accessing remote data

Unit 8: Managing Contracts

Strict vs. loose contracts
Bandwidth and stamp coupling
Consumer-driven contracts

Unit 9: Communication Protocols

Synchronous communication
Asynchronous communication
Dynamic quantum entanglement

Unit 10: Managing Workflows

Defining orchestration
Defining Choreography
Analyzing tradeoffs
Hybrid topologies
Hands-on exercises: Choosing a workflow type

Unit 11: Distributed Transactions

ACID transactions
BASE Transactions
Eventual consistency patterns
Managing transaction through state machines
Compensating updates

Unit 12: Transactional Sagas

Three dimensional sagas
Epic Saga
Fantasy Fiction Saga
Fairy Tale Saga
Parallel Saga
Phone Tag Saga
Horror Story Saga
Time Travel Saga
Anthology Saga
Transactional Saga Tradeoffs
Hands-on exercises: Choosing the right transactional saga

Target audience and prerequisites

This course is for software developers that want to become software architects and for software architects that want to focus on problems within distributed architectures such as microservices and event-driven systems.

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