For too long, we have regarded architecture the same way Martin Fowler once observed: “…things that people perceive as hard to change…” which has resulted in a great deal of overengineering up front in countless projects, thus introducing significant risk. Mature and sophisticated architectures require equally mature and sophisticated development teams, environments, and organizations. Significant, rapid cultural change is extremely difficult to execute. That said, generally, practitioners see the risk of premature optimization as preferable to a downstream rewrite (where decomposing a monolithic system into a well-factored distributed system can take many years of effort). In truth, however, this is a false dichotomy.