The evolution of compute has also opened new possibilities regarding how we structure and architect our applications. Mark Richards talks about "Ingredients that go into an evolutionary cauldron – agility, velocity, and modularity" (source: keynote talk, Fundamentals of software architecture at O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference in London 2016). By this, he means that, when we are talking about the topic of software architecture, we need the ability to change and evolve the way we do things in order to keep up with the ever-increasing expectations we have of new technologies. Instead of investing in complex analysis and planning, organizations should invest in making sure their software solutions include the essential evolutionary ingredients so they can change and evolve at an acceptable pace when they need to.

With the progress that's being made in serverless compute technologies today, we can unlock new levels of these key ingredients. In the upcoming sections, we are going to explore the various evolutionary steps in software architect at a high level, as follows:

• Monolith—single code base
• N-tier—achieve individual scale
• Microservices—do one thing and do it well
• Nanoservices with serverless