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The benefits and drawbacks of horizontal and vertical boundaries |
2020-11-28 17:53:12 UTC |
- Boundaries between different technical areas (layers) of the system
- Example: a layer for the API, a layer the business logic and a layer for communicating with the database
- Benefit: allow for technological flexibility (for example, relatively easy to switch to other kind of DB)
- Drawback: single functional change is likely to affect multiple layers
- Boundaries between different functional areas of the system
- Example: functionality for managing customers can be separated from functionality for placing orders
- Benefit: Changes within a single functional domain can happen within a single part of the system
- Especially helpful if different parts maintained by different teams!
- Changes within a single functional domain can happen within a single team and coordination with other teams is only required if the communication with other functional domains needs changes as well
- See Architecture and people - Conway's law
- See microservices, where different small teams each maintain one or more microservices that encapsulate a certain functional area across several layers of the technical stack, even down to the database
- Clean Architecture (book by Robert C. Martin)
- Building Evolutionary Architectures (book by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua) (summary slides)
- Conway’s Corollary