If you want evidence that the software development industry is susceptible to fashion, just go and take a look at all of the hype around microservices. It’s everywhere! For some people microservices is “the next big thing”, whereas for others it’s simply a lightweight evolution of the big service-oriented architectures that we saw 10 years ago "done right. Microservices is by no means a silver bullet though, and the design thinking required to create a good microservices architecture is the same as that needed to create a well structured monolith. And this begs the question that if you can’t build a well-structured monolith, what makes you think microservices is the answer?
Simon is an independent software development consultant specialising in software architecture; specifically technical leadership, communication and lightweight, pragmatic approaches to software architecture. He is the author of two books about software architecture; Software Architecture for Developers (a developer-friendly guide to software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility) and The Art of Visualising Software Architecture (a guide to communicating software architecture with sketches, diagrams and models). I’m also the creator of the C4 software architecture model and Structurizr, a web-based tool to create software architecture diagrams.
