Chapter 9 — Foundations (of architecture styles)

Core ideas

• Fundamental patterns the styles are built from: big ball of mud (the anti-pattern — no discernible structure), unitary/client-server, and the deeper split of monolithic vs. distributed deployment.
• The distributed-architecture reality check: the Fallacies of Distributed Computing — (1) the network is reliable, (2) latency is zero, (3) bandwidth is infinite, (4) the network is secure, (5) topology never changes, (6) there is one administrator, (7) transport cost is zero, (8) the network is homogeneous. Add the authors’ extras: distributed logging is hard, distributed transactions are hard, contract maintenance is hard.
• Distributed brings power (independent scaling/deployment, quantum-level characteristics) but a whole category of new problems (see the fallacies).

Trade-offs to argue

Monolithic = simpler, cheaper, easier to reason about, but one quantum. Distributed = flexible per-quantum characteristics, but you inherit all the fallacies plus operational complexity.