In an enterprise context, the benefit and value of developing distributed systems vs monolithic systems is, I believe, key to whether large organisations can thrive/survive in the disruptive world of nimble startups nipping at their heels.
The observed architecture of most mature enterprises is a rats nest of integrated systems and platforms, resulting in high total cost of ownership, reduced ability to respond to (business) change, and significant inability to leverage the single most valuable assets of most modern firms: their data.
In this context, what exactly is a ‘rats nest’? In essence, it’s where dependencies between systems are largely unknown and/or ungoverned, the impact of changes between one system and another is unpredictable, and where the cost of rigorously testing such impacts outweigh the economic benefit of the business need requiring the change in the first place.
Are microservices and distributed architectures the answer to addressing this?
Martin Fowler recently published a very insightful view of the challenges of building applications using a microservices-based architecture (essentially where more components are out-of-process than are in-process):
http://martinfowler.com/articles/distributed-objects-microservices.html
The led to a discussion on LinkedIn prompted by this post, questioning the value/benefit of serviced-based architectures:
Fears for Tiers – Do You Need a Service Layer?
The upshot is, there is no agreed solution pattern that addresses the challenges of how to manage the complexity of the inherently distributed nature of enterprise systems, in a cost effective, scalable way. And therein lies the opportunities for enterprise architects.
It seems evident that the existing point-to-point, use-case based approach to developing enterprise systems cannot continue. But what is the alternative?
These blog posts will delve into this topic a lot more over the coming weeks, with hopefully some useful findings that enterprises can apply with some success..
The Learning CTO 