Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition

Preface

When we set out to write the fourth edition of Software Architecture in Practice, our first question to ourselves was: Does architecture still matter? With the rise of cloud infrastructures, microservices, frameworks, and reference architectures for every conceivable domain and quality attribute, one might think that architectural knowledge is hardly needed anymore. All the architect of today needs to do is select from the rich array of tools and infrastructure alternatives out there, instantiate and configure them, and voila! An architecture.

We were (and are) pretty sure this is not true. Admittedly, we are somewhat biased. So we spoke to some of our colleagues—working architects in the healthcare and automotive domains, in social ...