Architecture

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. ...

Title and Author of Paper Architecture of a Database System. Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker, James Hamilton. Summary Architecture of a Database System provides an explanation of how to implement a relational database. It begins with an architectural overview of the main parts of a database system as viewed through the life of an SQL query. This includes how the query is received, parsed and optimized and how the resulting data is returned from storage as part of a transaction. ...

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. ...