The Evolution of Software Architecture and DevOps: Brief Historical Perspective

The evolution of technology goes hand in hand with the growing demand for more robust, simple-to-maintain products with advanced security, which is so important in the current state of the world. Additionally, organizations strive for a faster time-to-market, another significant element in today’s market.

We started a series of articles devoted to software architecture and DevOps evolution. We will touch upon historical perspective, discuss major stages of software architecture evolution, and discuss trends shaping the future of the tech world. In this article, we are going through the major stages of software architecture evolution and analyze the current state of software architecture in DevOps.

Historical Perspective

The first applications using monolithic architecture appeared around the 1950s and were very common until the 1990s. It grew popular within the software development community due to the limitations of hardware, development practices, and deployment models. Although having all the components as a single codebase was challenging, monolithic architecture was still simple and allowed centralized control over the solution.

Client-server architecture (1980s-2000s) was the next step in the evolution of software architecture. Since personal computers (PCs) and local area networks (LANs) were becoming more common, client-server architecture implementation was hard to avoid. Applications were divided into client-side and server-side components. This way clients were handling user interfaces and servers were managing data and business logic.

Next was the three-tier architecture which became popular in the 1990s and is still used today. It introduced an additional layer between clients and servers, known as the middleware or application server layer. Applications were divided into presentation, application, and data tiers, which allows for more modular and scalable designs.

Service-oriented architecture introduced in the 2000s is also widely used today. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) introduced the notion of loosely coupled, reusable services that communicate over standardized protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST).

Services are designed to perform specific functions and can be composed and orchestrated to create complex applications. SOAP promotes interoperability, flexibility, and reuse but requires careful governance and management of service lifecycles.

The most recent approaches in software architecture, are microservices architecture and serverless architecture. Both have been presented in the 2010s and are also among the top ones nowadays.

The microservices architecture allows breaking applications into smaller, independently deployed services that communicate via HTTP protocols and messaging queues. Each service is responsible for a specific portion of a solution and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.

One of the examples of the successful adoption of microservices architecture is a solution for one of the clients. When we started working together, their platform was a monolith, and the decision was made to transition to microservice architecture. This decision helped our client to swiftly adapt to potential changes in technology, legislation, etc., and save time and costs in the future on development and further maintenance.

Transitioning to microservice allowed fast integration of a billing system for the client’s distributors: the created orders synchronized within both the client’s system and the billing system. This simplifies the documentation management process and allows the generation of reports on payments.

Serverless architecture is often referred to as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) as it allows developers to distract from infrastructure management and focus on writing code in the form of functions instead. These functions get activated by different events and run in containers.The cloud provider takes care of setting up and scaling the infrastructure automatically. With serverless, you get benefits like less work to maintain, pay-per-use pricing, and rapid scalability. However, it might tie you to one provider and could affect how fast your code runs.

One of our projects was initially set to utilize serverless architecture. However, as we dug deeper into the project, a different story emerged.

One of the main advantages of serverless computing is its scalability. The burden of provisioning and managing servers falls on the cloud provider, allowing businesses to focus on development. However, for this client, the anticipated workload involved millions of function executions per month. While serverless scales automatically, the cost implications for such a high volume became a major concern, and we are talking about millions of functions monthly.

Beyond the cost factor, managing a vast network of individual functions spread across the serverless landscape can be challenging. Debugging, monitoring performance, and maintaining consistent code deployments across these functions can become a time-consuming task requiring a lot of resources to complete.

What’s next?

As to the future of software architecture, experts unite in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Quantum Computing, and Edge Computing. We will talk about the new trends in detail in our next articles, so follow our blog for more information.