Course Outline

Day 1 – Architecture Evolution, Enterprise Demands & MACH Architecture

·      Module 1: Introduction to Modern Architecture & Monolith Decoupling

o   Evolution of Software Systems: Moving from monoliths to distributed architectures, SOA, and microservices.

o   Drivers for Scalability & Decoupling: Technical debt, operational bottlenecks, organizational scaling (Conway’s Law), and maintainability.

o   Enterprise System Demands: Designing for high availability, fault tolerance, elastic scalability, and cloud readiness.

o   Practical Activity: Legacy Monolith Audit — Analyzing a monolithic system case study to identify architectural bottlenecks and decoupling triggers.

·      Module 2: MACH Architecture Deep Dive

o   Overview of MACH Principles: Breaking down Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless architectures.

o   API-First Design: OpenAPI specs, REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC, API gateways, and contract-first development.

o   Cloud-Native SaaS & Headless Solutions: Decoupling front-end user experiences from back-end business logic.

o   Building Enterprise Systems: Integrating decoupled components, managing multi- tenant architectures, and vendor-neutral ecosystems.

o   Practical Activity: MACH Architecture Blueprinting — Designing a headless, API-first integration diagram for a multi-channel enterprise application.

Day 2 – Microservices Patterns, Integration & Data Management

·      Module 3: Microservices Fundamentals & Inter-Service Communication

o   Microservices Fundamentals: Single responsibility, loose coupling, high cohesion, and service autonomy.

o   Service Communication: Synchronous (HTTP/gRPC) vs. Asynchronous (Event-driven, Message Brokers like Kafka/RabbitMQ).

·      Module 4: Distributed Data Management & Scaling Strategies

o   Data Management in Microservices: Database-per-service pattern, Saga pattern for distributed transactions, CQRS, and Event Sourcing.

o   Scaling Strategies: Horizontal vs. vertical scaling, auto-scaling groups, load balancing, circuit breakers, and rate limiting.

o   Practical Activity: Microservices Breakdown & Saga Modeling — Mapping out service interactions and failure recovery flows for a distributed transaction scenario.

 Day 3 – Domain-Driven Design (DDD) & Architectural Blueprinting

·      Module 5: Strategic & Tactical Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

o   Core Concepts: Strategic design, Core Domains, Supporting Domains, and Generic Subdomains.

o   Ubiquitous Language & Bounded Contexts: Bridging business and engineering teams, defining context boundaries, and managing Context Maps.

o   Tactical DDD Patterns: Aggregates, Entities, Value Objects, Domain Events, Repositories, and Domain Services.

·      Module 6: Domain Mapping & Technical Blueprints

o   Architectural Blueprints: Translating complex business domains into scalable technical microservice contexts.

o   Practical Activity: Event Storming Workshop — Conducting an Event Storming session to identify domain events, aggregates, and bounded contexts for a business feature.

Day 4 – Architecture & DevOps Alignment & Capstone Review

·      Module 7: Architecture & DevOps Alignment

o   CI/CD Integration: How software architecture directly influences pipeline speed, testability, and automated delivery.

o   Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes concepts, and managing environment configurations.

o   Deployment Strategies: Blue/Green deployments, Canary releases, Feature Flags, and zero-downtime database migrations.

o   Observability & Distributed Tracing: Telemetry, structured logging, metrics, and tracing across microservices (OpenTelemetry, APM tools).

o   Practical Activity: Pipeline & Release Strategy Design — Designing a multi-stage CI/CD deployment strategy for a microservices release with rollback mechanics.

·      Module 8: Capstone Project & Architectural Defense

o   Integrated Architecture Design Exercise: Hands-on group workshop to architect a cloud-native application incorporating MACH, DDD context mapping, microservices patterns, and DevOps pipeline integration.

o   Architecture Trade-off Analysis: Evaluating security, performance, cost, and operational complexity.

o   Peer Presentation & Feedback: Presenting and defending the final architectural blueprint and deployment workflow to the instructor and peers.