“Attempting to divide a cohesive module would only result in increased coupling and decreased readability.”

Larry Constantine

Once a system is broken apart, architects often find it necessary to stitch it back together to make it work as one cohesive unit. As Larry Constantine so eloquently infers in the above quote, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds, with lots of trade-offs involved when breaking things apart.

In the second part of this book, putting things back together, we discuss various techniques for overcoming some of the hard challenges associated with distributed architectures, including managing service communication, contracts, distributed workflows, distributed transactions, data ownership, data access, and analytical data.

Part one was about structure; part two is about communication. Once an architect understands the structure and the decisions that lead to it, it’s time to think about how the structural parts interact with each other.