Software Architecture for Tomorrow: Expert Talk • Sam Newman & Julian Wood • GOTO 2024

Information hiding is a crucial concept for microservices - only expose what consumers actually need, allowing internals to change without affecting interfaces

Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) are valuable primarily as forcing functions for team discussions (75%) and secondarily as documentation (25%) - they should document trade-offs and enable future changes

Organizations often adopt microservices for organizational reasons (team autonomy, reducing coordination overhead) rather than technical scale needs

Asynchronous communication lacks clear definition - better to be specific about needs like non-blocking clients or event-driven architecture rather than using ambiguous terminology

Network challenges remain fundamental to distributed systems - developers need to understand timeouts, retries, idempotency and failure modes even with modern abstractions

Single page apps were problematic for component-based UI architecture - micro-frontends offer a better path for breaking down complex UIs

Critical thinking and understanding trade-offs is more important than specific technical implementations - focus on solving business problems rather than jumping to solutions

Resilience engineering concepts from other fields (biological systems, air travel) offer valuable insights for building robust distributed systems

Independent deployability requires getting very good at backwards compatibility - this is often underestimated

Information hiding boundaries should be stable, with frequently changing code hidden behind them - this enables parallel work and reduces coupling