A software architect is a programmer; and continues to be a programmer.

Never fall for the lie that suggests that software architects pull back from code to focus on higher-level issues. They do not! Software architects. are the best programmers, and they continue to take programming tasks, while they also guide the rest of the team toward a design that maximizes productivity. Software architects may not write as much code as other programmers do, but they continue to engage in programming tasks. They to this because they cannot do their jobs properly if they are not experiencing the problems that they are creating for the rest of the programmers.

Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy. The ultimate goal is to minimize the lifetime cost of the system and to maximize programmer productivity.

A good architecture will allow a system to be born as a monolith, deployed in a single file, but then to grow into a set of independently deployable units, and then all the way to independent services and/or micro-services. Later, as things change, it should allow for reversing that progression and sliding all the way back down into a monolith.