Murat Erder - Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps

It has been a few years since we (Murat and Pierre) published Continuous Architecture, and much has changed in that time, especially in the technology domain. Along with Eoin Woods, we therefore set out to update that book. What started as a simple revision, however, became a new book in its own right: Continuous Architecture in Practice.

Murat Erder and Pierre Pureur, Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World (Morgan Kaufmann, 2015).

While Continuous Architecture was more concerned with outlining and discussing concepts, ideas, and tools, Continuous Architecture in Practice provides more hands-on advice. It focuses on giving guidance on how to leverage the continuous architecture approach and includes in-depth and up-to-date information on topics such as security, performance, scalability, resilience, data, and innovation.

We revisit the role of architecture in the age of agile, DevSecOps, cloud, and cloud-centric platforms. We provide technologists with a practical guide on how to update classical software architecture practice in order to meet the complex challenges of todays applications. We also revisit some of the core topics of software architecture: the role of the architect in the development team, meeting stakeholders quality attribute needs, and the importance of architecture in achieving key cross-cutting concerns, including security, scalability, performance, and resilience. For each of these areas, we provide an updated approach to making the architecture practice relevant, often building on conventional advice found in the previous generation of software architecture books and explaining how to meet the challenges of these areas in a modern software development context.

Continuous Architecture in Practice is organized as follows:

In ).

In , our key ideas are laid out, providing the reader with an understanding of how to perform architecture work in todays software development environment.

In , we explore a number of architecture topics that are central to developing modern applications: data, security, scalability, performance, and resilience. We explain how software architecture, in particular the Continuous Architecture approach, can help to address each of those architectural concerns while maintaining an agile way of working that aims to continually deliver change to production.

In , we look at what is ahead. We discuss the role of architecture in dealing with emerging technologies and conclude with the challenges of practicing architecture today in the era of agile and DevOps as well as potential ways to meet those challenges.

We expect some of our readers to be software architects who understand the classical fundamentals of the field (perhaps from a book such as Software Architecture in Practice) but who recognize the need to update their approach to meet the challenges of todays fast-moving software development environment. The book is also likely to be of interest to software engineers who want to learn about software architecture and design and who will be attracted by our practical, delivery-oriented focus.

Len Bass, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman, Software Architecture in Practice (Addison-Wesley, 2012).

Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2012).

To keep the scope of this book manageable and focused on what has changed since our last book, we assume that readers are familiar with the basics of mainstream technical topics such as information security, cloud computing, microservice-based architecture, and common automation techniques such as automated testing and deployment pipelines. We expect that our readers are familiar with the fundamental techniques of architectural design, how to create a visual model of their software, and associated techniques such as the domain-driven design (DDD) approach. are a more recent and very accessible introduction to it.

For more information on DDD, please see Vaughn Vernon, Implementing Domain-Driven Design (Addison-Wesley, 2013).

Humberto Cervantes and Rick Kazman, Designing Software Architectures: A Practical Approach (Addison-Wesley, 2016). The AAD approach is also outlined in Bass, Clements, and Kazman, Software Architecture in Practice, chapter 17s.

The other foundational architecture practice that we dont discuss in this book is how to assess a software architecture. This topic is covered in of our previous book, chapter 14 of Software Systems Architecture, and chapter 21 of Software Architecture in Practice. You can also find a lot of information about architectural evaluation methods such as the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) via an Internet search.

We also assume an existing knowledge of agile development and so do not provide in-depth discussions of software development life cycle processes such as agile, Scrum, and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), nor do we discuss software deployment and operation approaches, such as DevSecOps, in any depth. We deliberately do not include details on any specific technology domain (e.g., database, security, automation). We of course refer to these topics where relevant, but we assume our readers are generally familiar with them. We covered these topics, except for technology details, in