Service architecture models: integration, autonomy and federation

How should several services of the same product, suite or ecosystem organize the concepts they share (customer, organization, shop, project)? This general architecture course compares the three big models on the market: the integrated monolith, autonomous services and the federated model. It connects them to the tools of Domain-Driven Design (bounded contexts, shared kernel, published language, anticorruption layer) and ends with a decision grid and migration trajectories. Applicable to software suites, ERPs, cloud platforms and internal microservice ecosystems alike.

1. 01
   Integrated monolith and autonomous services: two opposite answers to concept sharing

   Customer, shop, project, organization: when several services of the same product handle the same concepts, two architectures dominate the market, and they optimize incompatible goals.
   22 min
2. 02
   The federated model: control plane, local projections and reconciliation

   The synthesis that reconciles integration and autonomy: a control plane that owns the topology, services that own their resources, and a declarative convergence between the two.
   24 min
3. 03
   Boundaries and contracts between services: bounded contexts, shared kernel and published language

   Why 'customer' does not mean the same thing in two services, why the shared types library is a trap, and which Domain-Driven Design patterns healthily organize the relations between services.
   21 min
4. 04
   Choosing your model: decision grid, warning signs and migration trajectories

   None of the three models is good in the absolute: they answer different strategies. This chapter gives the choice criteria, the symptoms of the wrong choice, and the proven migration paths.
   19 min