#25 Dear Architects

Dear Architect,

Welcome back to our weekly issue!

This week we have in our spotlight a great video from Simon Brown, creator of C4 model, sharing best practices for becoming a successful software architect. Despite the title, I encourage everyone to invest a bit of your time to watch this talk, you may discover some useful suggestions.

We often don't pay too much attention to disaster recovery till it's too late. In this whitepaper, AWS provides a pragmatic approach to deal with disaster recovery. The knowledge shared in this short PDF is applicable not only on AWS but in any other cloud provider.

Another week and another article on Team Topologies, it's amazing how impactful become that book. In this post, we can see how the learnings from the book are applied in practice.

Microservices are one of my favourite topics, despite they are in the industry for a while, there is always a different approach to learn. In this post there a list of microservices best practices applying twelve-factor principles.

Finally, a good introduction to platform engineering and the value brought inside an organisation.

Enjoy the read and see you next week!

Five Things Every Developer Should Know about Software Architecture

The software development industry has made huge leaps in recent years, yet software development teams are often more chaotic than they are self-organizing, with the resulting code being more of a mess than was perhaps anticipated.
Successful software projects aren't just about good code, and sometimes you need to step away from the IDE for a few moments to see the bigger picture.
This aimed at software developers who want to learn more about software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility.

Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud

Disaster recovery is the process of preparing for and recovering from a disaster. An event that prevents a workload or systems from fulfilling its business objectives in its primary deployed location is considered a disaster. This paper outlines the best practices for planning and testing disaster recovery for any workload deployed to AWS, and offers different approaches to mitigate risks and meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for that workload.

Your Team Structures Ain’t Working. Let’s Apply Team Topologies

Team structures can be a divisive issue. There have been some big controversies over team types. We’ll look at these first and then we’ll see how Team Topologies can move us beyond arguing about the best team types. Instead, it gives us tools to evaluate and adapt team structures to our situation.

Keep your Microservices Clean Using the Twelve-Factor App Principles

Let’s be honest, an architecture based on microservices adds its share of complexity to how things are developed. Often, it feels like going through the entire creation process of a new microservice is too labor-intensive for what we try to accomplish. Why not just add the feature to this existing service? After all, the entities are in the same domain.

The Rise of Platform Engineering

The rise of microservices, container orchestration, and the like have introduced novel engineering challenges. Platform engineering teams have formed at a number of organizations to shoulder these responsibilities. In some respects, the role of a platform engineer hasn’t drastically changed from that of other DevOps related roles. There is truth in noting that the title, “Platform Engineer” is nothing but a new title. However, a number of factors are, and continue to, cause the traditional responsibilities of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to shift.