Bounded context
A part of a system where each business term has one meaning and one model, with explicit translation at its edges.
A customer in sales has a pipeline stage, in billing a tax number, in support a ticket history. Forcing one shared customer model on all three makes every change risky. A bounded context gives each area its own model and its own data, and defines how they exchange information. Contexts are often the best candidates for module or service boundaries.
Related terms
- DDD (domain-driven design): Designing software around the business’s own language and rules, with the code split where that language changes meaning.
- Microservices: An architecture where a system is built from small, separately deployed services, each owning its data and talking to the others over the network.
- Modular monolith: One deployable application split inside into modules with clear boundaries, each owning its data and using the others only through defined interfaces.
- Database per service: Each service owns its data and no other service reads its tables directly; the others go through its API or its events.
