Head in the Cloud

Customer-First. Team-Focused. I like to take a customer-first approach to architecture and software design. A system architecture should always deliver value to the customer. Either directly--features, user experience--or indirectly by enabling teams to deliver value. If a team is going to be able to deliver value, the system needs to be easy to reason over, easy to maintain, easy and safe to extend, and easy to operate. Every architecture or design decision should answer: How does this deliver value to my customer? How does this deliver value to my team? Competing Styles. The Swinging Pendulum. It seems the big debate lately is monolith vs microservices. Academically, each at the opposite end of the spectrum: the massive, single deployable unit monolith on one end and the highly decomposed highly distributed microservices on the other. Each come with their pros and cons and serve teams better depending on team size, skill level, and goals. Notice I didn't include the customer in t