Microservices rules #5: Deliberative design
This is the second article in the series about microservices rules: what good looks like, which are a set of principles and practices for using microservices effectively.
The articles in the series are:
1. Practice continuous delivery/deployment
2. Implement fast, automated deployment pipelines
4. Provide a great developer experience (DevEx)
5. Use a deliberative design process
6. Design independently deployable services
7. Design loosely coupled services - part 1, part 2, part 3
9. Develop observable services
10. Big/risky change => smaller/safer and (ideally easily) reversible changes - part 1 - incremental architecture modernization, part 2 - continuous deployment, part 3 - canary releases, part 4 - incrementally migrating users, part 5 - smaller user stories
11.Track and improve software metrics and KPIs
Designing software is all about making decisions. An architecture is created by making a series of design decisions. Each decision solves a particular problem by choosing or creating a solution. The solution modifies the architecture by adding, modifying or deleting architectural elements and the relations between them. The resulting architecture is a composition of all the past design decisions. It’s essential, therefore, to use Microservices rule #5: a deliberative design process.
Miriam-Webster defines ‘deliberation’ as follows:
In other words, deliberative design involves thinking about how to solve a problem and carefully picking a solution.
In this article, I describe the 7 step deliberative design process. But first, let’s look at some unreliable ways to make design decisions.