How to become an excellent architect in the cloud-native era?

Introduction to "Software development needs to face essential and ancillary difficulties. Cloud native and DevOps greatly reduce ancillary difficulties, allowing architects to focus on business complexity, and DDD is an effective way to manage business complexity."

The author of this article: Zhang Gang, senior technical expert of Alibaba Cloud Cloud, and core member of ALPD methodology.

Learn now: https://developer.aliyun.com/topic/course/alpd

The essential difficulties of software development

In 1986, software engineering giant Frederick Brooks wrote a famous paper "No Silver Bullet". He wrote at the beginning of the article:

In the next 10 years, there will not be any single method or technology that can increase the productivity of software development by more than 10 times.

This argument caused huge controversy at the time. So far, "No Silver Bullet" is still a topic that is often brought up for discussion. However, the true value of this paper is far from limited to this. If you continue reading, you will find that. It is not enough to stay in the discussion about whether there is more than 10 times the productivity. What really deserves attention is Brooks's judgment on the cause. I summarize the important points as follows:

There are two types of difficulties in software development, one is essential difficulties, and the other is accidental difficulties.

Essential difficulties are closely related to the nature of the software, so such difficulties cannot be solved by tools or languages. For example, the problems that software solves are real-world problems. If real-world problems are inherently complex, it is impossible to eliminate this complexity with any tool.

Attachment difficulties are related to the tools or methods we adopt. For example, software needs to be implemented in a certain language, software needs to be compiled and deployed, and software may be implemented as defects, all of which are related to specific implementation methods. This type of difficulty can be improved through the improvement of tools, methods and technology.

Essential difficulties include software complexity, invisibility, changeability, and compliance (referring to software development that also needs to comply with factors such as laws and regulations, external systems, etc. that are not subject to subjective will)

As an architect who has worked in the software development industry for 20 years, "No Silver Bullet"'s discussion of essential and subsidiary difficulties gave me a lot of inspiration.

For many years, I have always regarded "management of essential difficulties and elimination of ancillary difficulties" as the motto of software development activities. What is particularly interesting is that I recently discovered that as an architect who mainly works on business systems, when cloud native is becoming a trend, the responsibilities of the architect have changed. And this change is closely related to "management essential difficulties and elimination of ancillary difficulties."

Business architecture is of course also an important responsibility of architects. Business and technology have been deeply integrated, and business requirements for response speed and development quality are getting higher and higher. At the same time, in the cloud-native era, servicing has almost become an inevitable choice. Regardless of business responsiveness, development quality and servitization, they are all closely related to business planning capabilities. Isn't this the most important aspect of "the essential difficulty of management"!

Domain-driven design, although Eric Evans's book of the same name was written in 2004, it has also had a greater influence in the technical community over the years. But why has the popularity suddenly risen sharply in recent years and has become particularly concerned? This is because our business has finally become more and more complex, to the point where it cannot be well managed without proper methods-this also coincides with the subtitle of the DDD book "The Way to Deal with the Core Complexity of Software". The division of microservices and cloud native services in terms of services is also a key driving factor.

Become an architect in the cloud-native era

In today’s business environment, you can make better use of cloud-native infrastructure, better perform business planning, efficient and high-quality analysis, and manage domain models, and use domain models to guide architecture design and development practices. He is an architect in the cloud-native era. Important skills.

The cloud effect and Alibaba Cloud Developer Academy jointly launched the " ALPD Cloud Architect Series-Domain-Driven Design " course is also around this theme.

ALPD stands for Advanced Lean product development. It is a new R&D paradigm in the cloud-native era proposed by Alibaba Cloud's cloud efficiency team. It integrates four types of practices: technology, engineering, collaboration, and innovation, and provides efficient solutions.

The above two pictures are the ALPD method and the supporting system diagram respectively. We hope that ALPD and its solutions can help enterprises and developers to achieve a 10-fold increase in performance-10 times the response speed, 10 times the process quality, and 10 times the effectiveness Value delivery.

In this course, we will bring you the domain-driven architecture and practical part of the ALPD method system.

It is also very happy to be able to share knowledge and experience with community developers through this external organization.

ALPD Cloud Architect Series Courses-Advanced DDD Master

In the course compilation, we divided the course into the following chapters:

01|The essence of the domain model is business cognition
02|Case study: High-quality domain model enhances business flexibility
03|High-quality domain model comes from continuous evolution
04|Case analysis: sorting out business concepts and discovering domain models
05|From Model to Code: The Building Blocks of Domain Driven Design
06|Aggregation: the unit to ensure business integrity
07|Layered Model and Code Organization of Domain Driven Design
08|Core domain, general domain and support domain
09|Split subdomains based on business capabilities and business scenarios
10|Guardian domain boundaries and build autonomous services
11|Bounded context mapping mode
12|Use microservices to build domain assets

Each lecture was kept for about 15 minutes to focus on a relatively cohesive theme.

Lecture 1-4, discuss a basic concept of the domain model, including what is a domain model? Why should I care about the domain model? How to do basic domain modeling?
5-7, mainly concerned with the realization of the domain model-centric software, which specifically corresponds to the tactical mode of domain-driven design, such as entity objects, value objects, domain services, domain event building blocks and aggregations, resource libraries and factories, which are complete with business The part that is closely related to sex.
8-12, the architecture design centered on the domain model of concern specifically corresponds to the strategic model of domain-driven design, such as topics such as subdomains, bounded context, bounded context mapping, etc. In the last 12 lectures, we also discussed the relationship between microservices and domain assets. Microservices is an important topic at the moment. If there is insufficient attention to domain-driven design, it will also affect the implementation of microservices and cloud native.
Throughout the course, there are no obscure concepts. I hope that through concise cases, students can easily understand the core ideas and key practices of domain-driven design. I hope you can also learn this course to start from the essence, better understand DDD and put it into actual project implementation.

Click on the picture below or the link at the end of the article to join the learning path of Cloud Architect Series Course-DDD Architecture Practical

Of course, domain modeling and domain-driven design are still skills that need to be deliberately practiced for a long time, and the content in the course is just to attract jade. In the follow-up practical work, I hope you can continue to apply and improve, keep improving, and become the excellence of the cloud native era. Architect!

Learn now: https://developer.aliyun.com/topic/course/alpd

Copyright Statement: content of this article is contributed spontaneously by Alibaba Cloud real-name registered users. The copyright belongs to the original author. The Alibaba Cloud Developer Community does not own its copyright and does not assume corresponding legal responsibilities. For specific rules, please refer to the "Alibaba Cloud Developer Community User Service Agreement" and the "Alibaba Cloud Developer Community Intellectual Property Protection Guidelines". If you find suspected plagiarism in this community, fill in the infringement complaint form to report it. Once verified, the community will immediately delete the suspected infringing content.