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Updated: March 2, 2026 at 3:18 PM

Continuous Architecture in Practice (short summary)

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CoA Book Club

The chapter material is based on the book analysis in the Code of Architecture book club

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Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps

Authors: Murat Erder, Pierre Pureur, Eoin Woods
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Length: 352 pages

6 principles of continuous architecture: from projects to products, quality attributes, delay decisions and architecture for DevOps.

Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps - original coverOriginal

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Building Evolutionary Architectures

Fitness Functions, evolution of architecture and architectural quantum

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6 principles of Continuous Architecture

6 principles of Continuous Architecture

ContinuousArchitecture1
Architect products
2
Focus on NFR
3
Delay decisions
4
Architect for change
5
Build/Test/ Deploy/Operate
6
Inverse Conway
Hover over a principle or click "Show all" for a walkthrough

First stream: Chapters 1–2

Chapter 1: Why Software Architecture is More Important Than Ever

Architecture in the Agile world, architecture in the cloud, the role of the architect as a “non-value adder”. Definition of Continuous Architecture and set of principles. Description of the end-to-end case study.

Chapter 2: Architecture in Practice—Essential Activities

  • Making and governing architectural decisions
  • Quality attributes and technical debt
  • Feedback Loops: Fitness Functions, Continuous Testing
  • Models and notations for describing architecture
  • Architecture as a decision flow

Stream guest

Maxim Smirnov — IT architect, author of the “Architecture of IT Solutions” channel. In the past, the chief architect of Beeline, the Bank of Russia and Binbank Digital.

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Learning Domain-Driven Design

DDD, Bounded Contexts, Event Sourcing and Integration Patterns

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Second stream: Chapters 3–4

Chapter 3: Data Architecture

  • DDD: Ubiquitous Language and Bounded Contexts
  • Polyglot Persistence: SQL/NoSQL
  • Consistency Models and Eventual Consistency
  • Event Sourcing
  • Data Ownership and Analytics
  • Schema Evolution in SQL and NoSQL

Chapter 4: Security as an Architectural Concern

  • CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
  • Threat identification and prioritization
  • Threat Modeling
  • Shift-Left Security
  • Zero Trust Architecture

Materials mentioned

NIST SP 800-63: Authenticator Assurance Levels
FIDO2: Web Authentication (WebAuthn)
HashiCorp Vault: Secrets Management
Zero Trust Architecture (NIST)

Stream guests

  • Vaclav Dovnar — independent consultant on secure development processes
  • Dmitry Gaevsky — engineer of dev-to-dev solutions, RnD and event-driven systems

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Site Reliability Engineering

SLO, error budgets, monitoring and four golden signals from Google

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Third stream: Chapters 5–6

Chapter 5: Scalability

Architectural approaches to scaling:

  • Stateless load
  • Stateful load
  • Horizontal and vertical scaling

Chapter 6: Performance

Performance as an architectural characteristic:

  • Why performance is important
  • Performance Monitoring
  • Optimization techniques

Materials mentioned

Requirements Engineering for Software and Systems
Architecting for Scale (Lee Atchison)
AWS Well-Architected Framework
Ozon article about caching

Stream guests

  • Alexey Tarasov — develops the architecture of Tinkoff Investments
  • Daniil Kuleshov — architect of the new authorization system

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Release It!

Resilience Patterns: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Timeouts

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Fourth stream: Chapters 7–9

Chapter 7: Resilience

Sustainability as an architectural characteristic. Patterns: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retry, Timeout.

Chapter 8: Emerging Technologies

AI and Blockchain - their impact on software architecture.

Chapter 9: Conclusion

Summing up the book and recommendations for implementing Continuous Architecture.

Resilience materials mentioned

Site Reliability Engineering (Google)Building Secure and Reliable Systems
AWS Fault Isolation Boundaries (whitepaper)
Deployment Archetypes for Cloud (Google)
A Philosophy of Software Design
Release It! (Michael Nygard)

Stream guests

  • Evgeny Peshkov — technical lead, founder of the DDDevotion community
  • Sergey Baranov — architect, founder of the ArchDays conference

Source

Telegram: book_cube

Post by Alexander Polomodov about Resilience

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Resilience as an architectural characteristic

Basic terminology

Fault

A random condition that, if it occurs, can lead to the failure of a system or component.

Failure

A situation where the system deviates from the required behavior. Fault is the cause, Failure is the consequence.

Availability

Measurable characteristic: the ratio of availability time to the total system operating time.

Reliability

Probability of failure-free operation over a specified period of time in a specified environment.

High-Availability vs Resilience

Old Approach: High-Availability

  • Application and Database Clusters
  • Cross-site data replication
  • Hot standby for emergency transfer

Problems: complexity, high cost, long failover, complete inaccessibility during recovery

New approach: Resilience

  • Each part of the system is responsible for its stability
  • Adaptive behavior during failures
  • Limiting error propagation (blast radius)

Advantages: flexibility, graceful degradation, quick recovery of individual components

Key insight: High-Availability was designed for monolithic on-premise systems. For distributed microservice systems (on-premise or in the cloud), Resilience is a more suitable approach.

MTBF vs MTTR

MTBF

Mean Time Between Failures

Mean time between failures. The focus of the High-Availability approach is to maximize the time between failures.

MTTR

Mean Time To Recover

Average recovery time. Focus of the Resilience approach: minimize cooldown and blast radius.

Paradigm Shift: In modern systems, part failures occur quite often. Instead of trying to prevent all failures (MTBF), it is more important to learn to recover quickly (MTTR) and limit the impact of failures.

Mechanisms for providing Resilience

Repeated requests

Retry with exponential backoff

Automatic restart

Self-healing processes

Circuit Breaker

Open circuit during faults

Bulkhead

Isolation of system compartments

Timeout

Correct work with latency

Fallback

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Additional Resources

Where to find the book

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