A passionate full-stack technical specialist guides readers through the intricacies of next gen problem solving
By Bhanu Sireesha Gunda, Web/Full-Stack Community Lead, Cognizant Softvision
An application architecture describes the patterns and techniques used to design and build an application. The architecture gives you a roadmap and best practices to follow when building an application so that you end up with a well-structured app.
Application Architecture depicts different architecture aspects such as Functional Analysis, Implementation Architecture, Tools & Technology, Data, Non-Functional, Deployment Architecture, views of an Application. It enables you to envision the big picture and reduce cost by removing redundancies. Integrating components in the application and other systems are also clearly demarcated for everyone to visualize. All Upstream systems send data to applications and downstream systems receive data from our clearly illustrated application. It allows a wide range of stakeholders to find what they require.
It also outlines the best development and deployment processes.
The architecture document applies to each static and dynamic aspect of the system. As it incorporates many views of the system, thus makes the record complete and consistent.
Functional Analysis
It defines the complete list of business functionalities to be achieved in an application and the detailed analysis of every functionality. It enables everyone to view the purpose of functionality in the complete application and provides traceability of the total functionality implementations and any change requests related to functionality.
Implementation Architecture
The architecture pattern can define the application type. The best-known application architecture patterns are:
- Single-tier/thick client/desktop application
- Client-server/2-tier
- n-tier
- Message Bus
- MVC Architecture
- Event-Driven Architecture
- Micro Services
- Restful Services
- Service-Orientedapplication Architecture
- Modular
- ETL(Extract, Transform and Load)
Tools & Technologies
It states the tools & technologies used for the wide-ranging implementations & processes of the application or the system. A few of them are below:
- Development IDE’s ( Visual Studio, Eclipse, STS, Intellij, Visual Studio Code, and Soon)
- Technologies ( Angular, React, Node, Mongo, Java, Post GRE, BlockChain, AI, Machine Learning, IoT, and Soon)
- CICD/Repository (Git, Gitlab, Jenkins, and Soon
- Issue Trackers: JIRA, CDETS, and Soon
- Run time environments: Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Soon
Data Architecture:
The data architecture is composed of models, policies, rules, or standards that govern which data is collected and stored, arranged, integrated, and used in data systems and organizations.
The Data Architecture of the application also defines different layers of data. Also, it provides outlines of input that comes to the data store and output to the downstream systems.
Non Functional Requirements
The application architecture also illustrates multiple nonfunctional requirements of an application, such as caching, security, performance, exception management, logging, configuration management, validations, and workflow.
Deployment Architecture
The deployment architecture defines the deployment pipelines, environment to deploy every component, CI/CD process, multiple Integration patterns. It also depicts the mapping of a logical architecture to a physical environment. The physical environment includes the computing nodes in an intranet or Internet environment, CPUs, memory, storage devices, and other hardware and network devices.
Integration Architecture
The integration architecture defines the integration patterns inside the application — also, the integration & mappings with upstream and downstream applications.
Development and Deployment Best Practices
The issue trackers such as Jira, CDETS should be clearly defined. Development models such as agile, waterfall, etc., should be limited. Deployment should be done with best practices such as CI. Also, Run book activities for every deployment should be specified.
The application architecture is the most critical and early phase of any application. The application architect should envision the big picture of an application till the very tiny implementation of an application. Every decision of the architecture should be taken based on facts and complete clarity.
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