Separation of Concern Strategies for Integrated Systems

Websites and web applications encounter new and changing responsibilities during its lifetime and even during development. Facing this challenge without a clear definition of what the responsibilities are for your site or application in contrast to systems it interacts with can cause friction between teams, inaccuracy in estimations, and unrealistic or unplanned demands on software architecture. Developing an understanding of how responsibilities of integrated systems can be separated enables better collaboration between teams and better architectural decisions.

In this session we will take a look at strategies separating responsibilities between your site or application and the systems it interacts with. These strategies include the topics of handling performance, automatic failover, complex data pipelines, and security. For each topic we will look at responsibilities relevant to a site or application and give examples of how and why you might choose to include or exclude that responsibility.

This session might be for you if you oversee a combination of front-end, back-end, system, and database teams, you plan architecture that integrates with many systems or has to meet performance or security requirements, or you simply like microservices architecture.

The key takeaway from this session will be a toolbox of ideas of how to separate concerns of your site or application from the systems it interacts with.