Software architecture is in crisis, and the way to fix it is a hefty dose of anarchy.

Some lay the blame for this on @boicy with the whole microservices thing.

(Admittedly, @nicolefv, @jezhumble and @realgenekim didn’t help when they statistically proved that he might have been onto something with all that de-coupling and team-alignment…)
However I don’t blame him at all.

I think he saved us; bringing us back to the path of value-delivery and independent services, but now with added independent teams.
But one thing is clear. Microservices need more architecture, not less (as do other forms of #Accelerate-style software organisation).

(See https://t.co/B2hWmXhIqe if you need convincing)
I mean, all those pesky slices we need to carve up our monoliths (or were they big balls of mud?) That’s a significant amount of work right there…
The truth is, the vast majority of attempts at - and ensuing aftermaths of - such slicing and continuous delivery have highlighted problems for almost all organisations, even the ones who were doing great architecture: How to scale their architects.
One of the biggest problems? Suddenly architects (and I include myself in this group) needed to be in far too many places at once, doing all that "architecture".
And so to cope, we architects either kept doing our job and became bottlenecks, or admitted defeat / got circumnavigated, or worse still went back to code and created “frameworks” which helped teams stick to the true path.

*Shudder*
None of these approaches have worked. And they never will.

And consequently many, many #microservices adoptions failed; with #microservices themselves getting an undeserved bad name in the process.
But microservices aren’t a curse on software delivery - and they ought to be a blessing.

What we need is a workable way to approach them, and in the process realise the associated benefits of both team autonomy and improvements in system architecture.
In the remainder of this thread I’m going to introduce the idea of an #AnarchisticArchitecture.

I’ll describe what it is and you could do it. Hopefully you’ll see how it offers the best (only?) way out of this mess.
Let’s remind ourselves first what “#anarchy” means: It’s the absence of government. The absence of authority. https://t.co/iJAZQJIXgg

Straight away that means how we are used to doing architecture, via all-powerful architects taking all the decisions, is going to have to stop.
But decisions still need to get made - that’s what architecture is.

(As @Grady_Booch has said “architecture represents the set of significant design decisions that shape the form and the function of a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”)
@martinfowler agrees “software architecture is those decisions which are both important and hard to change”.

So the first test is can an #AnarchisticArchitecture deliver on this?

The answer is "Yes".

More from Software

The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1


Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2

Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3

The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4

It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5

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IMPORTANCE, ADVANTAGES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF BHAGWAT PURAN

It was Ved Vyas who edited the eighteen thousand shlokas of Bhagwat. This book destroys all your sins. It has twelve parts which are like kalpvraksh.

In the first skandh, the importance of Vedvyas


and characters of Pandavas are described by the dialogues between Suutji and Shaunakji. Then there is the story of Parikshit.
Next there is a Brahm Narad dialogue describing the avtaar of Bhagwan. Then the characteristics of Puraan are mentioned.

It also discusses the evolution of universe.(
https://t.co/2aK1AZSC79 )

Next is the portrayal of Vidur and his dialogue with Maitreyji. Then there is a mention of Creation of universe by Brahma and the preachings of Sankhya by Kapil Muni.


In the next section we find the portrayal of Sati, Dhruv, Pruthu, and the story of ancient King, Bahirshi.
In the next section we find the character of King Priyavrat and his sons, different types of loks in this universe, and description of Narak. ( https://t.co/gmDTkLktKS )


In the sixth part we find the portrayal of Ajaamil ( https://t.co/LdVSSNspa2 ), Daksh and the birth of Marudgans( https://t.co/tecNidVckj )

In the seventh section we find the story of Prahlad and the description of Varnashram dharma. This section is based on karma vaasna.
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.