Architectural Decisions and Their Consequences

Architectural Decisions and Their Consequences

Our customers continually challenge us to design and produce systems that are characterized by a plethora of adjectives. We’ve all heard the wish-list so many times, "We need a system that is agile, scalable, highly available, secure ..." and so forth. While our hearts are certainly in the right place in our efforts to achieve such things for our customers, oftentimes we can be somewhat naïve concerning our own abilities to attain all goals equally on a given project. The truth is that we can’t have it all, and as architects we must carefully weigh the trade-offs and consequences of choosing to optimize for a given goal. It then follows that the difficulty of evaluating the consequences of our design decisions will only compound as the number of goals increase.