Articles on software architecture

The choice of technologies: certain architectural choices are coupled with their execution environment, as may be the case with Serverless.

Conversely, a Microservices architecture is intended to be agnostic in terms of the technologies. The need for system resilience. The material typology of the screens. Good architecture is defined by: Its scalability: The architecture must consider the future evolutions of the software according to the business need. Its simplicity: A complex architecture is often a source of failure.

For this, it is necessary to: Its maintainability: A good architecture also incorporates the tools necessary for its maintenance. Comments on this what is software architectureguide article are welcome. Related posts. What does it take to become an architect? Here are five of the most important ones. Like Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free. Layered Pattern The layered pattern is probably one of the most well-known software architecture patterns. Layer Responsibility As mentioned, each layer has its own responsibility. Advantages Most developers are familiar with this pattern. It provides an easy way of writing a well-organized and testable application. Disadvantages It tends to lead to monolithic applications that are hard to split up afterward.

Developers often find themselves writing a lot of code to pass through the different layers, without adding any value in these layers. If all you are doing is writing a simple CRUD application, the layered pattern might be overkill for you.

Ideal for Standard line-of-business apps that do more than just CRUD operations Microkernel The microkernel pattern, or plug-in pattern, is useful when your application has a core set of responsibilities and a collection of interchangeable parts on the side.

Advantages This pattern provides great flexibility and extensibility. Some implementations allow for adding plug-ins while the application is running. Microkernel and plug-ins can be developed by separate teams. The predefined API might not be a good fit for future plug-ins.

Advantages Command models can focus on business logic and validation while read models can be tailored to specific scenarios.

You can avoid complex queries e. Disadvantages Keeping the command and the read models in sync can become complex. Advantages This software architecture pattern can provide an audit log out of the box. Each event represents a manipulation of the data at a certain point in time. For example, if you add a property, the database still contains events without that data.

Your code will need to handle this missing data graciously. A diagram can explain. Advantages You can write, maintain, and deploy each microservice separately. A microservices architecture should be easier to scale, as you can scale only the microservices that need to be scaled. With microservices, a lot of extra concerns come into play: communication, coordination, backward compatibility, logging, etc. Teams that miss the necessary skill to write a well-structured monolith will probably have a hard time writing a good set of microservices.

Martin Series. Among the several different architectural styles, they typically remove capabilities from us in order to enforce a pattern of writing code. They force high-level design decisions upon us. Sometimes, those high-level decisions can trickle into how we write the bulk of our low-level code. Have you seen or worked on projects with either of these? Consider how vastly different they are. Imagine how angry you'd be.

It'd still suck though. The architecture you choose has potential to have a profound impact on what the resulting code will look like. The other point I wanted to line up with this is that outgrowing or changing architectures can be painful. For example, the moment we realize MVC is too rudimentary for applications with business logic and domain complexity, we shouldn't put the bulk of our business logic in controller or services anymore here's why. We've just outgrown this architecture, and we need to move to another one better suited for the businesses' needs.

Domain-Driven Design is the next best option in that scenario. DDD however, requires us to think about partioning our code into domain, application, and infrastructure layers and keeping those layers uncorrupted. It's an entirely new framework for which we will write the majority of our code within.

Because each of these architectures each have their nuances, pros, and cons, it can be challenging to know which one makes most sense to use for your next big project. Remember when you had to solve math word problems in high school?

The process for solving those is to understand the problem, ignore the irrelevant details, and then choose the appropriate formula or formulae in order to solve the problem. If you listen carefully to problem that you're trying to solve, you'll be able to apply a similar process to identify the ideal architecture.

Here's a long list of all the system quality attributes that a system could have. Like other types of engineering, the foundation has a profound effect on the quality of what is built on top of it. As such, it holds a great deal of importance in terms of the successful development, and eventual maintenance, of the system. It is an abstraction of a software system.

Software architecture is important because all software systems have an architecture, and that architecture is the foundation for the software system. There are several ways to organize an application architecturally. Moving from one of these patterns to another is generally a technically expensive activity, and can cost a lot of time and money to do.

Domain-Driven Design , while considered a late majority trend, continues to be emphasized by architects looking for good guidance on context mapping and identifying boundaries within a system. Similarly, the C4 model can be very useful to create a hierarchical set of architecture diagrams to help understand your system.

InfoQ is continuing to see innovation in the overlap between software architecture and data architecture. Data mesh , added to the graph last year, remains an innovator trend this year.

As microservices have led to a polyglot persistence layer, API gateways offer abstractions, security, scaling, federation, and contract-driven development features. We continue to look at the role software architects play in their organizations. Architects also need to be able to communicate with many audiences, described by Gregor Hohpe as riding the architect elevator —talking to the CTO and other executives, then traveling down to the engine room to work with the developers.

For many teams, communication styles were very disrupted due to the pandemic and many companies adopting a long-term remote working strategy. This means architects have lost the ability to learn by osmosis simply because they could sit in the same room as the developers and overhear conversations. Where this has been helpful, it has led to more written communication, whether in IM chat rooms, or architecture decision records, and keeping those up to date because teams are regularly referring to them.

The leading architects are finding ways to leverage the constraints of a fully remote team to their advantage, and creating better software designs because of it. OAM is a specification for defining cloud-native applications and focuses on the application, rather than the container or orchestrator. Similarly, Dapr is a framework that has pluggable components meant to make cloud-native development easier. Although Microsoft was involved in their creation, both are open source projects, work on any cloud provider, and Dapr may become a CNCF project.

Both Dapr and OAM have yet to see major adoption and are therefore clearly innovator trends to keep an eye on. WebAssembly is another innovator trend.

For architects, it will be interesting to see if it is used as just a supplement to web frameworks and mobile development, or if systems will be designed with WebAssembly in mind, and how that will manifest. A final note about GraphQL , which crossed the chasm on the trends graph last year. Just as the sprawl created by microservices led to new patterns for managing that sprawl, for companies that have invested heavily in GraphQL, they are needing GraphQL Federation to assist with managing the new complexity.

Principal Software Engineer at Blackbaud. For over two decades, his focus has always been on providing software solutions that delight his customers. He has worked in a variety of industries, including retail, finance, health care, defense and travel. Thomas lives in Denver with his wife and son, and they love hiking and otherwise exploring beautiful Colorado.

As part of the Garage, she delivers technology-enabled innovation to clients across various industries, from banking to catering to retail to NGOs. QCon, the international software development conference, is returning in-person and online in Find practical inspiration not product pitches from software leaders deep in the trenches creating software, scaling architectures and fine-tuning their technical leadership to help you make the right decisions.

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