Loosely Coupled Architecture

The Executive Summary

Writing software is like building Lego. You have many independent units of code that communicate with each other to serve specific purposes. The level at which those components depend on or serve other components defines how teams or services can test and deploy their applications on demand without requiring orchestration with other teams or services.

Tight-coupled architectures (aka Monoliths) are brittle, hard to change, test and release. Loosely coupled architectures (aka Microservices) are lean, with a single responsibility, without many dependencies, allowing teams to work independently, deploy independently, fail and scale independently, increasing business responsiveness.

Characteristics & opportunities:

In loosely coupled architecture, services and applications:

• Serve a single purpose or have a single responsibility
• Have a clear interface for communication
• Have less dependencies on each other
• Can be agnostic to outside concerns
• Can change their underlying technology without affecting the rest of the application
• Are easier to automate tests
• It can be deployed independently without affecting the rest of the ecosystem.
• Can scale independently
• Can fail independently
• Allow your teams to work independently without relying on other teams for support and services.
• Allow small and frequent changes
• Have fewer technical debts
• Have a faster recovery from failure

Till the next time!

Marcio Sete