What you'll learn, and how you can apply it

Abstract

Architecture plans in enterprises tend to resemble late-night infomercials. First, you see a person or system that seems incapable of survival—a situation that can be immediately rectified if you just buy into the product. (One popular infomercial shows incompetent people mangling tomatoes transitioning into Ginsu-wielding sous chefs; similarly, the architecture pitch starts with hideous complexity then moves to clean orthogonal box diagrams.) Operators are always standing by.

Real architecture never reaches that blissful end state. Something always interrupts the program: businesses change, technology changes, or funding dries up. What would happen if you did reach the end state, anyway? Is IT in the company done? Of course not.

The truth is that there is no end state. We must all learn to build systems that evolve and grow. We need to stop aiming for the end state and understand that change is continuous. We cannot predict the details, but we can learn the general patterns.

Michael Nygard demonstrates how to design and architect systems that admit change—bending and flexing through time. Using a blend of information architecture, technical architecture, and some process change, Michael walks you through examples of rigid systems to show how to transform them into more maneuverable architecture.

This workshop includes both teaching and hands-on design sessions. Design sessions will be paper and whiteboard work in small groups. You’ll work on real problems drawn from a variety of industries.

Outline

Day 1

Foundations:

• Information hiding
• Decision hiding
• Separation of concerns
• Architectural styles

Architectural patterns:

• Layers
• Pipes and filters
• Broker
• Proxy
• Components and glue
• Interpreter
• Microkernels
• Event stream/CQRS
• Command

Application architecture:

• Consumer-driven contracts
• Segregated interfaces
• Bounded context
• Layers redux
• Hexagonal architecture

Day 2

Living in complex systems:

• Organizations as complex systems
• Local viewpoints
• Local optimization, global deoptimization
• Second-order effects, the law of unintended consequences

Team-scale autonomy:

• Safety in systems
• Independent action
• “Without permission”

Evolutionary architectures:

• Microservices
• Message-driven systems
• Microkernels

Information architecture:

• Identifiers and their many issues
• Single system of record
• Augment upstream
• Contextualize downstream
• Pluralism
• Open-world systems

High-leverage architecture:

• Data/metadata unification
• Rules-based systems
• Generalized minimalism