Defining Boundaries and Letting Go

In Chapter 1, Architecting for Innovation, we learned that the role of architecture is to enable change so that autonomous teams can confidently and continuously deliver business value. The key concept here is autonomy, but we need more than just autonomous teams. We need an architecture that promotes autonomy. We ultimately accomplish this by creating autonomous services with fortified boundaries.

But before we can fortify our boundaries, we need to define those boundaries. This is where our functional architecture emerges and dovetails with our technical architecture. We will define our boundaries at multiple levels, including the subsystem, service, and function levels. We define these boundaries up front so that autonomous teams can work in parallel with guard rails in place as they experiment within their boundaries.

In this chapter, you will learn how to define these boundaries and we will introduce our autonomous service patterns. Then we will dig into the details in the remaining chapters. But first, we will review the proven concepts and guiding principles that help us shape our boundaries so that they are meaningful and flexible.

At the tail end of the chapter, we will touch on the hardest thing of all for architects to do, which is to let go and trust the autonomous teams to deliver within their boundaries. Here, we will look at how we can govern without impeding innovation.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Learning the hard way
• Building on proven concepts
• Thinking about events first
• Dividing a system into autonomous subsystems
• Creating subsystem bulkheads
• Dissecting an autonomous subsystem
• Dissecting an autonomous service
• Governing without impeding