Architecture terms

58 terms of 1552 total · page 1 of 3

🏛️ The decisions that outlive the code that implements them.

Software architecture is the set of decisions that are hard to reverse and expensive to get wrong. This category covers design patterns, structural patterns like microservices and event-driven systems, domain-driven design, scalability principles, and the trade-offs that shape how large systems are built and evolved over years. Good architecture does not happen by accident.

More on Architecture history · 6 references · key concepts

History

Software architecture emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1990s as systems grew too large for ad-hoc design, with seminal works like the Gang of Four's Design Patterns (1994) and later Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (2002) establishing shared vocabulary. The rise of object-oriented programming and distributed systems created pressure to document architectural decisions and patterns, leading to frameworks like MVC (mid-1990s) and layered architectures that became industry standards. The 2000s saw domain-driven design (Evans, 2003) shift focus toward modeling business complexity, while the 2010s introduced microservices and event-driven architectures as responses to scaling and deployment challenges at cloud scale. Today's architecture practice balances competing concerns—consistency vs. availability (CAP theorem), monolithic simplicity vs. distributed resilience, and synchronous reliability vs. asynchronous scalability—using patterns like CQRS, event sourcing, and service mesh to manage complexity in cloud-native systems.

Key concepts

Monolithic Architecture
Microservices
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
REST (Representational State Transfer)
API Gateway Pattern
Event-Driven Architecture
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)
CAP Theorem

Best references

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software Eric Evans' seminal work establishing DDD principles, bounded contexts, and ubiquitous language—foundational for understanding domain modeling and architectural decisions in the glossary's DDD terms.
Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems Sam Newman's authoritative guide covering microservices patterns, service boundaries, deployment, and organizational alignment—directly relevant to microservices, API patterns, and service mesh content.
The OpenAPI Specification Official specification for documenting REST APIs, widely adopted for standardizing API design and contracts—canonical reference for OpenAPI/Swagger Specification and REST API architecture.
Event Sourcing and CQRS Martin Fowler's widely-cited articles on CQRS and Event Sourcing patterns, providing practical guidance on command-query separation and event-driven architectures essential to the glossary.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications Martin Kleppmann's comprehensive reference on distributed systems concepts including CAP Theorem, eventual consistency, consensus algorithms, and vector clocks—core to distributed architecture understanding.
The Twelve-Factor App Heroku's methodology for building scalable, maintainable cloud applications—canonical reference for modern application architecture practices and deployment patterns.

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GraphQL Subscriptions Alternative to Long Polling & Server-Sent Events (SSE) Sep 25
GraphQL Subscriptions Leverages WebSockets Sep 17
GraphQL Subscriptions Specializes GraphQL Sep 17
Twelve-Factor App Complements Developer Experience (DX) Sep 16
WebSockets Realizes WebSocket Protocol Aug 22

OpenAPI turns a REST API's contract into a versioned, reviewable artifact, which is documentation-as-code in practice — the spec lives alongside the code and evolves with it. That discipline is what mitigates bus factor: when the API's behavior is captured in a machine-readable spec rather than trapped in one engineer's head, any teammate (or generated client, or mock server) can pick up the work. Remove documentation-as-code as the mediator and OpenAPI is just a file format with no obvious bearing on knowledge concentration.

OpenAPI / Swagger Specification · by means of · 🪢 Documentation as Code → Bus Factor

Rate limiting caps request volume at the edge, but on its own it can still let one noisy tenant drain shared pools before the limiter kicks in. The bulkhead pattern complements it by partitioning resources per client or workload, and in doing so it applies the defence-in-depth principle: if the rate limiter is misconfigured or bypassed, the bulkhead is an independent layer that still contains the blast radius. So the bulkhead is what turns a single throttling control into a layered defence.

Rate Limiting · via · 🪢 Bulkhead Pattern → Defence in Depth

API design and semantic versioning are linked by Hyrum's Law: once an interface has enough users, every observable quirk becomes part of its de facto contract, not just what the docs promise. That's why SemVer's MAJOR/MINOR/PATCH signal is so fraught in practice — a 'patch' that fixes an undocumented behaviour can still break real consumers, forcing API designers to treat observable behaviour, not just the written spec, as what versioning must protect.

API Design Principles · mediated by · 🪢 Hyrum's Law → Semantic Versioning (SemVer)

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Consistent Hashing

A hashing technique used in distributed systems where adding or removing a node rebalances only a fraction of keys rather than remapping everything — essential for distributed caches, load balancers, and sharded databases.