Architecture

Architecture is the bridge between (often abstract) business goals and the final (concrete) resulting system. – Software Architecture in Practice A software architect should act as a bridge between business stakeholders and technical stakeholders. To be this bridge requires understanding the business problem being solved, and being able to distill that problem into a technical solution that a software team can implement. In essence, the architect acts as a technical business analyst that helps to define the needs of an organization and recommend solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. It just so happens that an architect’s stakeholders include project managers, software developers, management, and other software architects. This article describes how a software architect can apply methods from business analysis to make their job easier and to satisfy these different stakeholders. ...

One of the realities of running a business is that you will — at some point — need to make money. This means you must sell something for more than it cost to make it. Profit = Total Revenue - Total Expenses So, to sell a service or feature (like a third-party API portal) at a profit, we need to understand how much it costs to make it, so we know how much to sell it for. In business parlance, the quantity we are looking for is the cost of goods sold — the accumulated costs used to create a good, including direct labor, materials, and any overhead. ...

The decision to build products using a service-oriented (or microservice) architecture has enormous technical and organizational impact that is reflected in everything from how teams write code, to how they communicate, to how the organization itself is structured. Given the breadth and depth of impact this decision has, it pays to reflect on why an organization chooses a service oriented architecture, how an organization can support such an architecture, and how teams and individuals can support the organization in successfully adopting a service oriented platform. ...

A big portion of any software engineering revolves around integrating multiple, disparate applications into a cohesive and functional whole. These apps may be built in house or third-party, or they may run on your network or distributed geographically, or they may be microservices designed to integrate. In any of these cases, you have several different options for integration, each with pros and cons. The integration patterns listed here are ordered by least to most sophisticated, but also by least to most complex. ...

Point-to-point communication between servers usually works just fine when one or two instances are communicating. One or two instances communicating However, if you increase the number of applications, the total number of connections increases. Three instances communicating In fact, the total number of connections increases as a square of the number of application instances. So, if you are running 100 instances, you will be maintaining O(100^2) connections. The scaling becomes quite painful. ...

I recently finished reading the excellent book “Release It!” by Michael Nygard. One of the key points that I wanted to remember was the stability anti-patterns. So, this post will serve as a reminder of architectural smells to look out for when designing production systems. This list of anti-patterns are common forces that will create or accelerate failures in production systems. Given the nature of distributed systems, avoiding these patterns is not possible. You must accept that they will happen, and program your application to be resilient to these failures. ...

Early pioneers in object-oriented programming paved the path towards using Model View Controller (MVC) for graphical user interfaces as early as 1970 and web applications have continued using the pattern to separate business logic from display. This article attempts to clarify the use of Model View Controller within web applications — giving consideration to the fact that most developers will be building their application using an existing web framework. ...