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The Software Architects' Newsletter
December 2024
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Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience on emerging patterns and technologies from industry peers.

In this year's final month, we present the highlights from the newsletter's past year, covering topics such as the evolution of architectures, the role of distinguished engineers and staff, plus platform engineering, and how the "AI Shift" affects architects.

We aim to explore interesting emerging trends through the lens of a software architect, and the yearly InfoQ Software Architecture and Design Trends Report often acts as the catalyst for identifying many interesting technologies, techniques, and processes.

News

The Evolution of Microservices

In a QCon London talk, Suhail Patel covers lessons learned from building a bank, starting from technological choices like using Cassandra and Kubernetes in the early days to how Monzo has maintained its speed of execution through platform engineering and developer experience.

Uber also moved most of its containerized microservices from µDeploy to a new multi-cloud platform named Up in preparation for migrating a considerable portion of its compute footprint to the cloud. The company spent two years working on making its many microservices portable to migrate between different computing infrastructures and container management platforms.

Complementary to this topic, Sid Anand sat down with Michael Stiefel for the InfoQ podcast episode, "The Software Architect's Path: Insights from Sid Anand", and mapped out how software developers can follow a path like Suhail's into the senior engineering and architecture disciplines.

Modular Monolith: Is This the Trend in Software Architecture?

January saw increasing discussion around creating well-structured monolithic applications, or "moduliths". Ruoyu Su and Xiaozhou Li, researchers from the University of Oulu, published an academic paper, "Modular Monolith: Is This the Trend in Software Architecture?" on arXiv, an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints. The paper mentions Google's Service Weaver framework and Spring Modulith.

Additional recent coverage of Spring Modulith can be found in a Voxxed Days presentation by Oliver Drotbohm, staff engineer at VMware (Broadcom), "Spring Modulith - Spring for the Architecturally Curious Developer", and an article from Abhinav Sonkar, Tech Lead at Axual B.V., "Improving Modular Monolith Applications with Spring Modulith".

McDonald's: Strangulating the Monolith to a Pluggable and Scalable Architecture

In a recent post on the McDonald's Technical Blog, Tasneem Damen, principal architect, shared that by extracting microservices from the monolith, McDonald's developers are creating more portable and resilient applications.

The article focuses on applying strangulating patterns and engineering techniques for brownfield innovation. Damen stated, "Many [microservice] frameworks exist for greenfield software development but are not always viable for a big-bang replacement of proprietary enterprise applications".

In a related post, InfoQ editor Aditya Kulkarni discussed how McDonald's has streamlined its continuous delivery using GitHub Actions and reusable workflows.

QCon London: The Art, Science, and Psychology of Decision-Making

At the recently held QCon London 2024, Hannes Ricklefs, head of architecture at the BBC, gave a well-received talk on decision-making, "The Art, Science, and Psychology of Decision Making". Ricklefs summarized the key reasons behind applying art, science, and psychology to the discipline of decision-making, focusing on appropriate methodologies and the effects of biases on our ability to make good decisions in both a personal and business context.

The Creative Act: How Staff+ Is More Art than Science

In this QCon NY talk recording, David Grizzanti discusses his path to Staff+ and how he views it as more art than science. He examines the parallels between creating art, creating software, and dealing with organizational dynamics.

Grizzanti presented at the inaugural InfoQ Dev Summit in Boston, and he also participated in a recent podcast related to this topic that explored how the Staff+ role is evolving to provide a clearer career path and options for mentorship within complex technical landscapes.

Transitioning from a Software Engineering Role into a Management Role

Software engineers who want to become good at leading engineers can use everyday opportunities to practice management. Peter Gillard-Moss gave a talk at QCon London, where he shared his experience with becoming a manager and provided tips and ideas for engineers aiming to become managers.

Gillard-Moss suggested that engineers who want to be good at leading engineers should "practice in the small". He said there are everyday opportunities for engineers to practice management. You don't need authority. Many engineers who end up as engineering managers are often spotted because they are showing flares of management in their teams.

Platforms, People, and Process for Great Developer Experience

In this InfoQ podcast, Shane Hastie spoke with Daniel Bryant about engineering culture and developer experience. Key takeaways included: Wherever you work in the organization, you are trying to deliver business value sustainably; the gap between the ideal experiment hypothesis and running in an observable way in production is developer experience; and the more context you have across the whole organization, the better the software you will deliver.

In a related talk at QCon London 2024 titled "Curating the Developer Experience", Andy Burgin discussed embracing Developer Experience (DevEx) as an operational philosophy at the betting company Flutter Entertainment. Recognizing the potential of DevEx to enhance productivity and foster collaboration and empathy between teams, Burgin explained how the container platform squad implemented and evolved their Developer Experience over several years.

Jessica Andersson also spoke with Shane Hastie about the role of platform engineering in empowering and enabling other teams. Andersson argued that a good platform engineering team has a non-blocking, self-service mindset and is perceived as helpful but not intrusive. Building strong, trusting relationships with development teams involves understanding their perspective and avoiding assumptions.

Enabling Fast Flow in Software Organizations

Resolving impediments to flow and removing unnecessary sources of cognitive load can make culture issues disappear in organizations, Nigel Kersten argued at FlowCon France 2024. He suggested starting with a clear strategy that is easy to communicate and then following the path to creating stream-aligned teams and platform teams.

Setting up a Data Mesh Organization

According to Matthias Patzak, a data mesh organization comprises producers, consumers, and the platform. Patzak talked about data mesh platforms at FlowCon France, where he stated that the platform team's mission is to make the producers' and consumers' lives simple, efficient, and stress-free. Data must be discoverable, understandable, trustworthy, and securely and easily shared across the organization.

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Case Study

Architectural Intelligence - The Next AI

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Right now, that "magic" technology has come to be known as AI.

Artificial Intelligence is a great umbrella term and is fantastic for marketing, but it doesn't mean one specific thing we can simply add to our software. And yet, product owners, CEOs, and marketing teams want us to add it to everything. Customers aren't asking for AI, but they will start to expect it as table stakes for every application.

We must get past vague, hand-wavy guidance about how and why we should use AI. It's like being asked to get out the spray can and apply a nice coat of AI to everything. Such a haphazard approach will not create the outcomes people are hoping for. We need a thoughtful approach that understands what AI is and where and when we should use it. That's what we're calling Architectural Intelligence.

Software architects now need to understand what AI is and what it isn't. This requires separating the AI hype from real software that we can actually implement.

There is nothing magical about GenAI and LLMs. Determining how, where, and when to use AI elements comes down to traditional trade-off analysis. One way to get more familiar with the capabilities of any new software is to use it on a regular basis. Architects can augment their decision-making and communication skills with AI tools, leading to better designs and greater understanding among team members.

This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Thomas Betts, "Architectural Intelligence - The Next AI".

To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "Architecture and Design", "Development", and "AI, ML, and Data Engineering" on InfoQ.

Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.

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