Should vendor landscapes shift into an industry-wide standard architecture model?

Standards are obviously good, but I am also for vibrant competition between ideas, approaches, and models.

I used to lead the solutions architecture team at WSO2 for more than 10 years. While working with architects I identified a bunch of issues that they are facing. First, people are looking at a mismatch of reference architecture because most of them are reference implementations. I call it a reference implementation because most are bound to a specific vendor. It's explaining how you build something using that particular vendor technology. I wanted to make a vendor and technology-neutral architecture.

Second, people are blindly moving to microservices. They are not looking at the complications they face in production systems and enterprises, or how to use microservices correctly. And there's a need to group or federate microservices but there's no standard to do that. In addition to that I saw a gap between the architecture, development, and deployment—basically between the architect, developer, and DevOps engineer. There was nothing common that you could take from architecture into development, and into deployment. So I wanted to build an architecture construct that can take throughout the development life cycle. I call the architecture construct a ‘Cell’ in the reference architecture.  

That's where cell-based architecture (CBA) came into the picture. I saw that the concept of cells in biology was very fitting because cells create complex systems, and in an enterprise, you see the same thing. I studied system biology a bit and looked at parallels between biology, system biology, and the system architecture to create this architecture style. For example, each cell should have a gateway, like the membrane of a biological cell that controls it.

After I released a paper on this in 2018, many other parallels came on the market. Uber is using a concept called Dorma, a domain-oriented microservices architecture, which is the same concept. A number of our customers use this concept to plan, build and run their cloud-native microservice deployments. We are planning to inherit some of the concepts in our internal product development in this low-code and pro-code platform as well. You can read the complete spec from https://git.io/fpwtf, released under CC-4.0 so feel free to contribute, comment and even criticize.