How We Untangled Our Distributed Monolith (Andreas Hinkelmann)

Unser nächstes Meetup findet in den Räumen des Softwareunternehmen codecentric AG (https://www.codecentric.de/) statt, welche uns auch Pizza und Getränke zur Verfügung stellt. Zu Gast ist Andreas Hinkelmann (Lead Software Architect bei Siemens), der uns die praxisnahe Migration eines Monolithen zu Microservices durch die Kombination von Domain-Driven Design und Qualitätszielen näherbringt.

Agenda

• ab 18:00 Uhr: Networking (bei Pizza und Getränken)
• 18:45 Uhr: Begrüßung und Vortrag
• 20:00 Uhr: Ausklang und weiterer Austausch
• 21:00 Uhr: Ende der Veranstaltung

Vortrag
(wird vorraussichtlich auf deutsch stattfinden)

My talk presents a practical case study of how we combined Domain-Driven Design (DDD) with a focus on specific quality scenarios of with Quality-Driven Design to create an architecture capable of evolving with our business. I'll share our collaborative modeling journey that brought together domain experts and development teams to identify proper bounded contexts, establish context maps, and define appropriate integration patterns. You'll see how we shifted from a technology-centric to a domain-centric organization, breaking down silos between teams.

The presentation demonstrates our concrete migration roadmap from a distributed monolith towards a genuinely microservices-oriented architecture, highlighting how we balanced immediate improvements with long-term architectural evolution.

More details:

I'll reveal how we derived specific quality scenarios for modularity, modifiability, analyzability, and replaceability that served as navigators for our DDD implementation. These scenarios became our architectural guardrails, helping us evaluate design alternatives and make principled decisions about service boundaries — both between bounded contexts and within them. I'll share how this approach enabled us to decompose our distributed monolith into more cohesive and independent services while maintaining system coherence. Importantly, these concrete quality scenarios made the DDD exercise more tangible for project leadership and management, allowing them to observe measurable improvements that ultimately led to their support for reorganizing teams according to our socio-technical evaluations.

I'll reveal both our successes and failures, including the painful lessons learned when our initial context boundaries proved incorrect and required realignment. This real-world case study provides practical strategies you can apply directly to your own projects, showing how embracing change through proper domain modeling creates both technical resilience and business agility.

Special

An diesem Abend wird Manuel Steinberg, Doktorand an der Hochschule München, auch noch kurz seine Forschungsarbeit zu Green Software vorstellen. Hierzu gibt es auch eine Umfrage, an der ihr euch auch heute schon gerne beteiligen könnt: https://survey.cc.hm.edu/limesurvey/index.php/668719