Technology

Thinking Like a Software Architect

A Hands-On Guide to Modern Architecture Fundamentals, Delivery, and Engineering in PracticeBy Tamsin Whitlock

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Length14h 28m

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Architecture is the set of decisions you will regret slowly. This book teaches you to make them deliberately. Most architecture books hand you a catalogue of patterns and leave you to guess which one fits. Thinking Like a Software Architect does the opposite. It gives you a repeatable way of reasoning: turn fuzzy requirements into measurable architecture characteristics, attach fitness functions that fail a build when the system drifts, and measure coupling instead of arguing about it. Components are derived from workflows and data ownership rather than from the org chart, so the boundaries you draw survive contact with real delivery pressure. Style chapters score modular monoliths, service-based designs, microservices and event-driven topologies against the same criteria on one running system, so the comparison is real rather than rhetorical. From there the book follows the system into production: distributed data and eventual consistency, contracts that version safely, resilience through timeouts and circuit breakers, and the delivery machinery of pipelines, infrastructure as code, progressive deployment and observability. Every chapter ends with decisions you can apply to the system on your desk this week. What you will learn • Define what architecture is, when it matters, and when it is premature • Translate quality attributes into measurable architecture characteristics and fitness functions • Reason about modularity, coupling and connascence with evidence rather than opinion • Identify and decompose components from workflows, data ownership and change patterns • Compare monoliths, modular monoliths, layered, service-based, microservices and event-driven styles on one system • Handle distributed data, transactions and eventual consistency without losing correctness • Design integration contracts and API boundaries that version safely over time • Add resilience, scaling and performance trade-offs with timeouts, circuit breakers and load strategies • Build security architecture around explicit trust boundaries • Take a system to production with pipelines, infrastructure as code, progressive deployment and observability • Document decisions with views, diagrams and architecture decision records • Apply Conway's Law deliberately and define the architect's role on a real team Who it is for This book is written for senior developers stepping into an architecture role and for practising architects who want sharper reasoning and fewer hand-wavy diagrams. It assumes you already write production code and are comfortable with services, databases and deployment pipelines. If you need to justify a design decision to engineers, product managers and operations teams at the same time, the frameworks here will help you do it with evidence.

Audiobook details

GenreTechnology

Length14 hrs 28 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

Publish dateSep 27, 2026

LanguageEnglish

1Thinking Like a Software Architect

2Foreword

3Preface

4About This Book

5Chapter 1: What Architecture Is and When It Matters

Show all chapters

61.1 Architecture as the Cost of Reversal

71.2 The Running System: Order Management at Meridian Supply

81.3 The Architect’s Remit and the Four Decisions

91.4 What Architecture Is Not

101.5 Stakeholders, Constraints and the Architecture Statement

111.6 How This Book Proceeds

12Chapter 2: Quality Attributes and Architecture Characteristics

132.1 From Vague Goals to Measurable Characteristics

142.2 Availability Arithmetic and the Cost of Nines

152.3 Latency Percentiles and Why Averages Lie

162.4 Fitness Functions: Making Characteristics Fail the Build

172.5 Trade-Offs, Priorities and the Characteristic Table

18Chapter 3: Modularity, Coupling and Connascence

193.1 Modules, Boundaries and Information Hiding

203.2 Afferent and Efferent Coupling, Instability and Abstractness

213.3 Connascence: Naming How Change Propagates

223.4 Measuring Coupling in a Real Codebase

233.5 Coupling, Cohesion and the Cost of Change

24Chapter 4: Component Identification and Decomposition

254.1 Workflow-First Decomposition

264.2 Data Ownership and the Write Rule

274.3 Granularity Drivers and Disintegration Pressures

284.4 Component Sizing and the Cost of a Boundary

294.5 Producing the Component Map

30Chapter 5: Monoliths, Modular Monoliths and Layered Styles

315.1 The Layered Style and Its Failure Modes

325.2 The Modular Monolith

335.3 Microkernel and Plugin Styles

345.4 Scoring the Monolith Family

35Chapter 6: Service-Based, Microservices and Event-Driven Styles

366.1 Service-Based Architecture

376.2 Microservices and True Data Ownership

386.3 Event-Driven Topologies: Brokers, Queues and Topics

396.4 Choreography, Orchestration and Workflow Ownership

406.5 Scoring the Service and Event Families

41Chapter 7: Distributed Data, Transactions and Consistency

427.1 Data Ownership, Replication and Read Models

437.2 Consistency Models and Eventual Consistency

447.3 Sagas and Compensation

457.4 Partition Trade-Offs and Availability Under Failure

46Chapter 8: Integration, Contracts and API Boundaries

478.1 Synchronous and Asynchronous Contracts

488.2 Versioning and Schema Evolution

498.3 Gateways, Routing and Boundary Responsibilities

508.4 Backpressure, Rate Limits and Flow Control

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Thinking Like a Software Architect

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