Chapter three. Software Architecture: Going to War

To be a software architect means that you must learn to think like an architect—in particular, a distributed systems architect. This is a substantial paradigm shift from thinking like an individual software developer writing one program. In this world of increasingly distributed IT systems, much of what you learned in your previous training can naively mislead you.

In order to go to war, you need to commit to a new mindset and a ruthless pursuit of architectural knowledge. Ignorance is our enemy, and knowledge is power on the architectural battlefield. We must erase mistaken assumptions and help you think about systems with much greater clarity, so that you can reason about the complex issues involved.