Software Architecture and Decision-Making: Leveraging Leadership, Technology, and Product Management to Build Great Products

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Macro Architecture: Coordination

A modern architecture includes services, databases, APIs, libraries, and Software as a Service (SaaS), and coordination makes everything work together. For example, when a user buys a book, the system processes the payment, prepares the book to be shipped, sets up delivery, and responds to the customer. Coordination decides the flow that connects the different parts together.

Depending on the use case, coordination can be simple or complex. Coordination code talks to many parts of the systems over the network as it does I/O operations (disk and network read/writes). If one service is a major bottleneck or if the system is performance-sensitive, we need to design the coordination layer carefully. There are several ...