An overview of how the InfoQ editorial team sees the Software Architecture and Design topic evolving in 2021, with a focus on what architects are designing for today.

Key Takeaways

• In a cloud-native world, architects are reprioritizing the -ilities they consider most important. Innovative architects are designing for resilience, observability, portability, and sustainability.
• Dapr and the Open Application Model are two ways to make building distributed systems easier, and it will be interesting to watch how they are adopted in the future.
• The pendulum seems to be coming to rest, after swinging to extremes between monoliths and microservices. As a result, architects are relying on well-established patterns and designs that focus on high cohesion and low coupling, regardless of the underlying technology.
• In fully-remote work environments, architects are finding new ways to communicate with their teams, and finding replacements for the water cooler chats which were useful for gathering knowledge.
• The next generation of GraphQL features, notably GraphQL Federation and GraphQL Microservices, are showing where to go next after companies have strong adoption of GraphQL.

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