Architectural Styles

Every application is divided into parts somehow, and the way it is divided decides what is easy to change, to deploy and to scale, and how many people it takes to run. The topic opens on a map of five common styles, told apart by what gets deployed as one unit and how the parts talk. Each style then gets the same treatment: its shape, what it makes easy, what it makes hard, and the team and product it fits, with a real company that uses it. A comparison turns team size and rate of change into a choice, a gotcha shows the most common way microservices lose their main benefit, and practice chooses a style for three very different products.