
- #BEST DOMAIN DRIVEN DESIGN BOOK RUBY HOW TO#
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To modularize a large monolith though, we need to make complex change happen on a large scale. A single team can make simple change happen on a large scale, or complex change on a small scale.
with being aware of the tradeoffs involvedĪ single centralized team can’t make change happen by working against the momentum of hundreds of developers adding features.Īlso, it can’t anticipate all the edge cases and have context on all domains of the application. with a holistic perspective on architecture.
with understanding and influencing developer behavior. We learned that all large scale changes start Our main monolith is one of the oldest, largest Rails codebases on the planet, under continuous development since at least 2006, with hundreds of developers currently adding features.Ī refactor on this scale needs to be approached completely differently from smaller efforts. The clearly defined ownership for areas of the codebase is one of the factors enabling us to do that. Shopify is running its main monolith on the newest, unreleased revisions of Rails. And with each component explicitly owned by a team, whole-codebase chores like Rails upgrades are easily distributed and collaboratively solved. We automatically triage exceptions to components, enabling teams to act on them without having to dig through the sometimes noisy exception stream for the whole monolith. Parts of the codebase that received heavy refactoring in recent years are now easier to understand because their relationship with the rest of the system is clearer. That means instead of degrading the design of existing code, new feature implementations now more often improve it. When making a change, developers are now more aware of the consequences on the design and quality of the monolith as a whole. We see a mindset shift across our developers with a stronger focus on modular design.
#BEST DOMAIN DRIVEN DESIGN BOOK RUBY SOFTWARE#
The added constraints on how we write our code trigger deep software design discussions throughout the organization. While we’re far from finished, we already reap the benefits of our work. We make consistent progress, but it's important to note that making changes at this scale requires a significant shift in thinking for a critical mass of contributors, and that takes time.
We generally stand by the original ideas as described in Deconstructing the Monolith, but almost all of the details have changed. I’ll lay out the current state of my team’s work, and some things we’d do differently if we started fresh right now. I’ve been working on this modularity effort for the last two and a half years, currently on a team called Architecture Patterns. It’s been 18 months since we last shared our efforts to make our Rails monoliths more modular. In summary, developers should feel like they are working on a much smaller app than they actually are.
Instead of worrying about the impact on parts of the system we know less well, we can change a component freely as long as we’re keeping its existing contracts intact, cutting down on feature implementation time. Instead of running the test suite on the whole application, we can run it on the smaller subset of components affected by a change, making the test suite faster and more stable. We can more easily onboard new developers to just the parts immediately relevant to them, instead of the whole monolith. The goal was to help us scale towards ever increasing system capabilities and complexity by creating smaller, independent units of code we called components. #BEST DOMAIN DRIVEN DESIGN BOOK RUBY HOW TO#
That’s why, over three years ago, Shopify founded a team to investigate how to make our Rails monoliths more modular. Rails doesn’t provide patterns or tooling for managing the inherent complexity and adding features in a structured, well-bounded way. Shopify’s core monolith has over 2.8 million lines of Ruby code and 500,000 commits.
But if an application is successful, there’s usually continued investment, resulting in additional features and increased overall system complexity. Ruby on Rails is a great framework for rapidly building beautiful web applications that users and developers love.