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Architecture terms

17 terms of 1466 total

🏛️ 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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Service Discovery Patterns
The mechanism by which services in a distributed system locate each other's network addresses — eliminating hardcoded IPs by maintaining a registry that services register with and query at runtime.
2mo ago architecture intermediate
API Design Principles
Guidelines for designing interfaces — method signatures, HTTP endpoints, error responses — that are intuitive, consistent, and evolvable.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: API Gateway Pattern API Gateway Pattern
A single entry point for all clients that handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, and protocol translation for backend services.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Circuit Breaker Pattern Circuit Breaker Pattern PHP 5.0+
Wrapping calls to a flaky downstream service with a state machine that opens (stops calls) after threshold failures, preventing cascade failures.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: DDD Value Objects in PHP DDD Value Objects in PHP
Immutable objects defined by their attributes rather than identity — Money, Email, Coordinate — that encapsulate validation and domain behaviour.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Event-Driven Architecture Event-Driven Architecture PHP 5.0+
A design paradigm where components communicate by producing and consuming events, enabling loose coupling and asynchronous processing.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Eventual Consistency Eventual Consistency PHP 5.0+
A consistency model where replicas may diverge temporarily but converge to the same value given no new writes — trading immediacy for availability.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: GraphQL GraphQL PHP 7.0+ 🧠 1
A query language for APIs where clients specify exactly the data they need, reducing over-fetching and under-fetching versus REST.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Long Polling & Server-Sent Events (SSE) Long Polling & Server-Sent Events (SSE) PHP 5.0+
Server-side push techniques for PHP — long polling holds HTTP connections open until data is ready; SSE streams events over a persistent HTTP response.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Monorepo vs Polyrepo
Monorepos store multiple packages/services in one repository enabling atomic cross-service changes; polyrepos give each service independent versioning.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
OpenAPI / Swagger Specification
A machine-readable YAML/JSON description of a REST API — enabling auto-generated documentation, client SDKs, mock servers, and contract testing.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Retry Pattern with Exponential Backoff Retry Pattern with Exponential Backoff PHP 5.0+
Automatically retrying failed operations with increasing delays — preventing thundering herd and handling transient failures gracefully.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Service Locator Anti-Pattern
A class that fetches its own dependencies from a global registry — hiding them from the constructor signature and making dependencies implicit, untestable, and hard to trace.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Specification Pattern PHP 5.0+
Encapsulating business rules as composable objects that evaluate whether a candidate satisfies them — separating rules from entity code.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Diagram: Twelve-Factor App Twelve-Factor App PHP 5.0+
A methodology for building scalable, maintainable SaaS applications using twelve best practices for configuration, processes, and services.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
Ubiquitous Language (DDD) 🧠 2
A shared vocabulary between developers and domain experts, used consistently in code, tests, documentation, and conversation.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
WebSockets PHP 7.0+
A persistent full-duplex TCP connection enabling real-time bidirectional messaging between browser and server without polling overhead.
3mo ago architecture intermediate
✓ schema.org compliant