Thoughtworks on evolutionary architectures

An interesting pick from the Thoughtworks blog. In this article Ford and Parsons position microservices as “one of group of architectures that support certain evolutionary behaviors”, explaining common characteristics of evolutionary architectures that can also be found in microservices.

I think this moves the attention back to an important line of thought that often gets lost in microservices discussions these days: the principles behind the architectural decisions and technical choices that add value to the business.

In my opinion the term “microservices” didn’t benefit to the overall change in direction we see today, because it moves the focus from the complex whole to the single parts, which may be an explanation why many people wrongly assess microservices in lines of code or other implementation details.

The term “evolutionary architecture” seems to achieve quiet the opposite: “evolutionary” is a reasonable hint to the guiding principles (far better then “micro”) and “architecture” forces you to think about concepts and cross-cutting concerns (opposed to “service”).

There is also an SE-Radio episode with Rebecca Parsons, where she discusses the practices behind evolutionary architectures.