bounded context

Without a doubt, the bounded context pattern from Eric Evans book domain-driven design is one of the more essential patterns for designing and building modern software. Especially in the land of microservices architectures, where setting proper bounded context which is highly linked with the business goals aka the domain is essential to not get into the distributed monolith anti-pattern. The bounded context is in its core a language boundary, a boundary where language can stay consistent and which is the boundary of the model designed for a purpose. Boundaries for people are crucial from a culture perspective. People cannot live without boundaries; it is a way in which we can define our self and separate us from the rest. To define our self creates an identity, a feeling of belonging which in time can create ownership. However, to be able to define our self, we must also define the others to keep our own identity. When we look at cultural anthropology, we traditionally did this on the border through get-togethers like marketplaces, where we exchange goods. Now if we want to keep the cultural benefits of the bounded context within our company, we must also take care of the cultural needs designing bounded contexts. In this post, I describe these culture needs when using the bounded context pattern.