What is architecture?
Since Software Development as a profession borrows quite a bit of nomenclature from the house building industry, the architect role could not be omitted. Software architecture is usually understood as one of the following:
- the process of designing a software system
- the set of principles that we follow while building applications of some system
- a diagram of a system presenting what it’s comprised of and how the inner parts are connected with each other
Every piece of software follows some architecture, sometimes it’s more explicitly defined, sometimes it’s an “accidental” architecture, which had not been planned, but rather comes out during the process of coding. The latter is alright for smallest projects.
An architecture is there to:
- plan the solution well and avoid costly mistakes
- have an overall look at the system - allows to create diagrams, like C4.
Architect Persona
The role of the software architect is usually seen as fundamental role in building a system. Before any line of code gets written, there should be a design prepared that will guide the developers to build a good system (unless we’re building something tiny).
A good architect should:
- have a decent understanding of the problem space - that way the proposed solution will trully apply to the problem that we want to solve
Types of Architects
We often see the following titles being mentioned regarding software architects:
- Enterprise Architect - responsible for the design of rules to be followed by an enterprise as a whole
- Solution Architect - responsible for a selected product/solution. They know the problem that they got to solve and they come up with some solution to that, taking into account the constraints and resources at hand.
- Application Architect - designs a single application, what technologies to use, etc.
The decisions of an Enterprise Architect will have an impact on the other architect roles. The policits and decisions made on the level of the organization will have to be respected by any project within that organization.
C4
C4 is a system of visualizing systems’ architecture. There are 4 levels of solution visualization in C4, from highest to lowest:
- Systems (C1) - a top-level look at a solution as a whole, where our system is a single block that users and our systems interact with
- Containers (C2) - each block is a single app, or some kind of data store, messaging bus, etc.
- Components (C3) - inner systems within an app, like controllers, and services
- Code (C4) - a collection of classes - it will change pretty often in an actively developed system, so it might be skipped sometimes.
It’s important to note that System diagram shows sysems, Container diagram shows containers, and Component diagram shows components. A Container diagram does not show a content of one container (app), but rahter apps and their interactions within the system.
