Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Tradeoff Analysis

The book is a must read for all who aspire to build modern systems. Microservices or otherwise. No one builds all-in-one super systems. The question is always whether to go full blown microservices or a compromise solution that's neither a monolith or a microservice. Microservices is definitely not a low cost architecture thats easy to recommend. The answer is always "it depends". This book helps navigate the difficult and treacherous decision making process in a structured manner. For someone who is looking at engineering a modern system or breaking a monolith should definitely read this . This book is a gold mine for you. For practitioners who are already in the process of figuring out how to break monoliths this book may give you structure to cover your bases and present your arguments. Its a good read for you . Be warned though that the reading speed will increase several fold somewhere 25-30% into the book as you start to encounter concepts you are already dealing with. ACID vs BASE or SYNC vs ASYNC etc., Overall a good book and an easy recommend

One of the best book on the topic I have read.

A practical book on software architecture. Highlights decision trade offs in distributed service based software architecture. Writing style is clear.

Good book but need a lot of self motivation to read.

Very good book

Lots of information, details about many metrics. Many good points covered for migration, code refactoring perspectives. Excellent guide for architects.

Not at all useful for senior leadeship. Its too much complicated and does not provide required information. In sample, I got few pages, which made be inclined to buy book and I am now not in position to return as its purchased through kindle. Waste of money.

The printing quality is inconsistent. One set of pages with crisp and clear fonts. However other sets of pages with blurred fonts impact readability. The price is too high for this low quality inconsistent printing. It's not expected from a highly reputed publisher(Oreilly Media). Don't overprice for such low quality printing or else provide quality.

Awesome book. Great overview and some deep dives into the many trade off dimensions architects are challenged with every day

o'reilly publishing sucks. I wish authors self-published. I would buy that instead.

This is a great book! It is a sequel to the authors' prior book, "Fundamentals of Software Architecture" (which isn't a prerequisite to this book, but is helpful). I liked that book. This one is way better. Where the first book stayed fairly high level and abstract, and focused on working as an architect in a company, this book is all about actual tough architecture decisions in practice. It applies some of the the first book's approaches and patterns (and a whole bunch of new ones) towards a fictional example application which a dev team is tasked to completely refactor. Basically, the book is structured as a narrative about a team breaking down a faulty outdated monolithic application into a modern microservices-based architecture. Each chapter essentially compares different aspects of how a monolithic architecture might have been written to do something in the past, then how a modern microservice architecture could do the same thing today. Along the way the authors offer terrific advice and approaches for effective tradeoff analysis (and countless suggestions and tips) that you can use when refactoring a large monolith app (or when building microservices from scratch), detailing at every level how you might sort out a tangled mess of dependencies into a clean microservices stack - from shared code libs/components/modules, to shared database tables and schemas, to various network concerns, etc. There is nearly no code (it's not an implementation book), but the descriptions of each example scenario, pattern, diagram, and everything around it are extensive and detailed. The authors don't actually offer any definitive "best practice" in any of the scenarios they consider, but rather present all the pros and cons of each approach you might consider - which all together support their overall thesis that there are no right or wrong answers in architecture, only tradeoffs to weigh and consider for any given design challenge and possible architectural solution. I give this book my highest recommendation - it's a winner.

This book teaches you how to think with real criteria, it’s a true gem in the world of systems. Even today, when I reread it, I see how many of the challenges it presents are now solved by modern technologies. That gives me the ability to understand why certain decisions were made back then, and also why, with today’s tools, I would approach them differently. Without a doubt, it has become a classic in the field, and I now fully understand why.

Very interesting insights for all architects working on distributed achitectures.