Clean Architecture: Saving You from Future Headaches
The Apption Data Podcast - Episode 2
Is there one right architectural pattern to use? Which ones can be avoided? The debate surrounding this topic comes with a lot of subjectivity and is dependent on the many constraints that cause developers to sway a certain way when it comes to choosing the right architectural pattern.
Yannick Robert, Senior Cloud Architect at Apption, weighs in on architectural patterns, common patterns used, patterns to avoid, and why your firm should be considering implementing clean architecture to save developers headaches in the future.
What is an Architectural Pattern?
An architectural pattern is a commonly used solution or concept for addressing recurring problems in software development. It provides a high-level guideline and framework for organizing various components of a solution, including business requirements, logic, and database persistence. Architectural patterns allow developers to structure their solutions in a manner that is scalable, maintainable, and testable. These patterns also facilitate adaptability to changing client requirements.
The business landscape is ever changing and adaptability is an essential piece of software development. Being able to test, scale, and easily maintain these assets is essential for client’s needs.
Choosing the Right Fit
When deciding on which architectural pattern is the best fit as a team, it is essential to consider the ease of use within your team. Choosing the appropriate architectural pattern greatly assists in onboarding new developers and provides them with a framework they can readily learn and apply to comprehend the extensive codebase more efficiently. This saves time and establishes a common ground for collaboration when working on features. With a shared understanding of the chosen pattern, the team can focus on the implementation details and abstractions instead of resolving differences.
Each architectural pattern solves different problems and may introduce its own challenges. However, the key lies in prioritizing the issues most relevant to your team's goals. By selecting a pattern tailored to address priority problems, you can effectively streamline development efforts and alleviate concerns that would otherwise demand unnecessary attention. Ultimately, it's a matter of trade-offs, as with any decision in software development.
What is the Result of a Poor Choice?
The effects of choosing the wrong architectural pattern can be subtle initially, particularly on new projects where the benefits aren't immediately evident. Issues may arise gradually, such as longer development times, increased complexity, and growing regression problems.
A key indicator is when developers rely heavily on data transfer objects (DTOs) that begin to infiltrate the business and domain layers between modules. This can lead to communication breakdowns and tight coupling between system components, resulting in complications within the team and a cascade of changes across multiple systems for even minor adjustments. The domino effect of coding becomes apparent, impacting project velocity and overall solution efficacy. There are many commonly used patterns among the software development world, understanding which ones have the best fit will save your team in the future.
Commonly Used Architectural Patterns
Commonly used architectural patterns in the industry include microservices and monolith patterns, as well as MVC (Model-View-Controller) or MVVM (Model-View-View Model) architectures. Additionally, newer approaches such as layered approaches, onion architecture, and domain-driven design (DDD) have gained popularity. While there is overlap among these patterns, each comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. All serve different purposes and can be effective depending on the context of the project.
The goal for any project is consistency and many projects follow the original pattern to deter a large shift given certain project constraints. These project constraints can include:
Team size
Number of teams
Familiarity of pattern
Timeline
Budget
Project constraints can deter the investment in the organization and overall cleanliness of your structure. When starting a new team or project, it is essential to understand the needs of your client and the expectations of your team. By implementing a standard approach, such as clean architecture, your team can seamlessly adapt to changing projects and constraints.
What is Clean Architecture?
Clean architecture, also known as layer design or hexagonal architecture, revolves around organizing into distinct layers to promote modularity, maintainability, and testability. Clean architecture consists of domain-centric objects, an application layer for business logic and policies, an implementation layer for infrastructure details, and a presentation layer for user interfaces or APIs. By separating concerns and encapsulating dependencies, clean architecture enables the creation of independent frameworks that work together cohesively.
Clean Architecture: Software is organized into distinct layers to promote modularity and testability.
This approach facilitates testing in isolation, development of components independently, and easy swapping of universal pieces, promoting a clear and maintainable structure for building applications. As a result, developers can better manage complexity and adapt to changes over time, making clean architecture a valuable practice in successful software development.
By separating these concerns and organizing it into distinct layers, you get a clean structure that helps you build these applications. Over time your team will be grateful for that separation because it will save your firm time and money, while also taking the headache away for your developers in the future.
When using clean architecture in the day-to-day, these appropriate separation of concerns around the features make it simple to break off and scale the bottlenecks where needed, whether that's cloud provisioning or emailing notifications. This separation and clean structure are massively beneficial to software development teams. To learn more about using Clean Architecture with .NET Core, check out what Jason Taylor has to say.
Clean Architecture Makes Teamwork Easier
Clean architecture facilitates collaboration within a team by providing a common ground and clear structure for discussions and development. When onboarding new members to the team, clean architecture simplifies the process by providing an organized set of rules and properties. Having implicit agreements on how components are placed within the solution helps everyone understand the context of the application, whether focusing on specific details or zooming out to see the bigger picture. This shared understanding streamlines processes like code reviews, as team members know where files belong, how they connect, and how modules communicate.
As a result, discussions can focus more on abstract logic and implementation details rather than semantics or dependencies, making meetings more productive and efficient. Clean architecture effectively saves time and enhances collaboration, benefiting the entire development process.
Microservices, Modular Monoliths & Clean Architecture
Microservices have become a popular architecture used by tech giants such as Netflix and Amazon due to their independent components and ability to be deployed, scaled, and updated without affecting the entire architecture. While there are many benefits to microservices, many businesses don't face the scale of problems that necessitate such a complex solution. For smaller to medium-sized companies, the overhead of microservices often outweighs the benefits, leading to a regression towards more simplistic monolithic architectures.
Modular monoliths combine the benefits of monolithic architecture with the flexibility to scale and adapt when necessary. With modular monoliths, different modules within the application communicate seamlessly, mimicking the interactions of microservices without the added complexity of distributed systems. Modular monoliths and clean architecture can function independently, but their combination offers a structured and scalable solution. Clean architecture promotes clear separation of concerns and facilitates effortless transitions from monolithic to microservice architectures when needed. The use of contracts between modules prevents tight coupling, minimizing circular dependencies, and simplifying future migrations.
In summary, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to architectural patterns. It's crucial to understand the needs of clients, teams, and overall projects when selecting an architecture. An ill-fitting architecture can trigger a chain reaction of issues over time, underscoring the importance of considering future development and updates in any software project. Clean architecture enables the segregation and organization of distinct layers, saving teams from future headaches and saving your firm time and money.
Listen to Episode 2 of the Apption Data Podcast - Clean Architecture: Saving you from future headaches below where Yannick Robert, senior cloud architect, does a deep dive into architectural patterns and clean architecture.