Continuous Delivery in Java

Chapter 3. Designing Architecture for Continuous Delivery

Now that you have been introduced to the motivations for continuous delivery, you are ready to explore the technical foundations to enable this practice: software architecture. In this chapter, you will learn about the importance of designing systems that are loosely coupled and have high cohesion, and the associated technical and business costs if these guidelines aren’t followed. You will be introduced to the importance of designing effective APIs, how cloud computing has impacted software architecture, and why many Java developers are embracing service-oriented development. The key goal of this chapter is for you to understand how to create and cultivate an architecture that supports continuously delivering Java applications.

Fundamentals of Good Architecture

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) defines software architecture as “the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both.” Although this may at first glance appear quite abstract, the mention of structures, elements, and properties is core to what the majority of software engineers think of as architecture. Taking a slightly different perspective, it is quite possible that you can relate to Martin Fowler’s definition that software architecture consists of the “things that people perceive as hard to change.” Regardless of which definition you prefer, several properties of ...