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Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

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11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#11

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler, and Enterprise Integration Patterns, Gregor Hohpe. both predate microservices, and both are still very useful today.

+1 for Fowler's book. Picked it up on a whim and it's so interesting to see patterns I've used for years documented in this book from the mid 2000s. He was excellent formal descriptions providing some more context than you may get organically.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#15

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler, and Enterprise Integration Patterns, Gregor Hohpe. both predate microservices, and both are still very useful today.

"Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)" https://martinfowler.com/articles/patterns-of-distributed-sy... and notes regarding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36504073

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#16
I think many of these debates about microserivces don’t take into account the number of responsibilities the system must offer. For simple systems of course micro services is too much. The number of books around microservices vs monolith can be seen as a function of the popularity of one approach vs the other.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#17
post #9

This may sound like I am a complete idiot, but I sincerely think that reading works like the Tao Te Ching may help more than reading books on software architecture. There are still many new ways of architecture to be found. For example, making software with an extension language could result in way better systems than a system envisioned by a customer who has no clue about computers. But unfortunately, it is often a…

> There are still many new ways of architecture to be found.

Good architecture tends to break up complexity into common building blocks, and avoiding patterns that might cause instability or failure. Or seeing the cause of the instability and then fixing it. IOW, there's really no need to recreate the wheel....

Over time, as you get good at it, you'll see the exact same patterns over and over again, so rather than need to experiment with new technologies or software architectures, you can just reach into your experience and bring things out you know work already.

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#18
post #14

I'd recommend Clean Architecture by Robert Martin.

+1 … it has a great discussion of structural vs object-oriented vs functional, presenting the trade-offs, it describes different service and module decomposition patterns, with pros and cons for each, without prescribing one.

Here is a blog post from Robert C. Martin about microservices and clean architecture: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/10/01/CleanMicros...

Re: Ask HN: What are good books on SW architecture that don't sell microservices?

#20
Actually you should avoid splitting software into microservices by default until you really need it. It's easy to catch the moment - you will see that movement of some project part into microservice will help you to close many points and issues.

So: 1) Read classic books about monolith software. 2) Read decent books about microservices approach.

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