Minimum Viable Architecture

There is no one-size-fits-all architecture for all scales for all project phases. Architecture should evolve with the product and it should be adopted to the requirements at different stages of product lifecycle.

That's the main idea from Randy Shoup talk - Minimum Viable Architecture. He calls this approach “just enough architecture”- the architecture that's good enough for the product to be released at current project stage.

Product Stages and Their Architecture:

📍 Prototyping.
- Goal: proof business concept, test the market and acquire first customers.
- Rapid iterations, a lot of prototyping.
- Technology doesn't matter, use any tools that get results fast.
- No architecture
- Single team

📍 Starting.
- Goal: solve customer needs as cheap as possible, acquire more customers.
- Rapid learning and iterations.
- Use simple, familiar tech stack
- Typically monolith architecture with a single database
- Rely on cloud infrastructure and open-source tools.
- Focus on competency growth, outsource everything else.
- Number of teams grows.

📍 Scaling.
- Goal: stay ahead of rapidly growing business.
- Time to rearchitect: "Getting to rearchitect a system is a sign of success, not failure."
- Build scalable architecture, focus on latency and performance
- Perform migration from monolith to microservices
- Scale team numbers

📍 Optimizing.
- Goal: make a system more sustainable, efficient and effective.
- Focus on small, incremental improvements.
- No major architectural changes.
- Improve operational efficiency.
- Consolidate the teams

I like the idea of matching architecture to business priorities and not overcomplicating the solution on early stages. The talk also shares some tips when rearchitecturing is really needed and how to do it without breaking the existing solution. Some ideas and recommendations about architecture looks too dogmatic for me, but overall the talk is really good ad I recommend to check the full video.

#architecture