Give me that old-time pattern language

What is a microservice? What do you mean when you say service discovery? How does a circuit breaker work? These questions (and many more like them) are rapidly circulating within our industry, and we're struggling to answer them well. You'll rediscover the value of pattern languages as Matt Stine explains how they can help us make sense of the ongoing paradigm shift in software architecture.

What is a microservice? What do you mean when you say service discovery? How does a circuit breaker work? These questions (and many more like them) are circulating rapidly within our industry, and we’re struggling to answer them well. As we attempt to surf the evolutionary architecture wave, we struggle to communicate these new concepts to our organizations. How do we communicate about architecture? We used to have a favorite tool: the pattern. Patterns have fallen out of favor over the last decade because developers and architects often used them ineffectively as cookie cutter components rather than tools for effective communication. You’ll rediscover the value of pattern languages as Matt Stine explains how they can help us make sense of the ongoing paradigm shift in software architecture. The title of Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein’s A Pattern Language communicates a great deal. Languages have a structure, and words have a network of relationships. The same is true of patterns. These structures and relationships help us to communicate well about the drivers, considerations, trade-offs, and consequences associated with architectural decision making.