Wiki software architecture diagram

The architecture diagram examples serve various functions. It always helps the relevant users to learn about system architecture and apply it in the decision-making procedures. It is crucial to communicate information regarding architecture. However, people must follow specific steps before making a diagram for architecture. These are:. With the help of such diagrams, complex information becomes easy to understand in a single image. Viewers can see the ways things interact.

People can also witness the downstream effects. Consistency is one of the poignant problems that software engineers come across. Several discrepancies and miscommunication may take place between the developers and project teams.

The diagrams must follow accuracy, standardization, and detail. It focuses on the structure along with the technological requirements, external services, servers, and databases. This diagram helps in website planning and design, including artistic, technological, and practical considerations. It uses a hierarchy structure to show website content management and website directory structure.

This kind of diagram involves a plan, system, and processes. It has a functional application as the framework for system procedures. The physical view is about cartography. It draws the map for physical hardware and system software. The physical view helps a software architecture diagram and includes the service layer, business layer, and data layer. It establishes relations amongst both internal and external systems, users, and services.

The Enterprise architecture diagram help manage the business and organizational model of a project. The diagram shows security policies, management tools, business plans, teams, roles, interaction, and workflow.

Messaging resources. Your computers use networks to communicate with each others. Both physical and virtual networks should be displayed. The diagram shows the compute, storage and messaging resources alongside with networks and availability zones. It also includes the instrastructure nodes which are not fulfilling any functional requirements, but addressing non-functional instead. There are plenty of tools to create a deployment diagram. OmniGraffle, LucidChart, Draw.

Deployment diagram complements the understanding of the system from the physical appearence perspective. The most of previous diagrams were very technical ones. Use Case diagram is more business oriented. It depicts how the persons are interacting with your system in a very high level way. Use cases themselves can be treated as business capabilities, which I were describing in this article.

The architect can draw a diagram with any graphical editor and with the same toolset used for other diagrams. Omnigraffle, LucidChart, Draw. PlantUml or LucidChart helps with that. Discuss this article on twitter. If you like the article, make sure to Subscribe for the upcoming articles! Context The c4 website does a pretty good job explaining their diagrams, but I still would like to provide my own understanding.

Example Context diagram This diagram displays the neo-banking digital platform presented by a blue rectangle in the center. How to draw Identify the persons who will use your system Identify the external systems Create a single rectangle depicting your system Add connections between the system, users and external systems Provide meaningful comments on every component Tools There are different tools you can use to create the context diagram.

Let's say we want to draw the aforementioned diagram for a neo-banking digital platform with uml: startuml! Important highlights Context diagram is the first thing you create when working on a system. Failing to do so may cost you missed integrations and mistakes during system design. Context may actually include some lower level details, this is perfectly fine. I was struggling with a context diagram for one banking system.

It would include only a newly created system and a single customer, which didn't bring any value. That way the context diagram started to make sense and allowed to omit those elements from the lower level diagrams.

We had a learning system in development. At the time of Alpha release we understood, that analytical system is not receiving the data from the client facing app. Should we have a context diagram in place, we won't make that mistake. Luckily, it was easy to fix.

Containers Containers. Containers everywhere! Example Container diagram How to draw Identify the list of entities: microservices, storages, external services Place them on the diagram Add comments on the purpose of each component and the technology it is implemented with Add connections with arrows Add meaningful labels to each arrow Pick up a color scheme and apply it Create a legend.

Tools Same as for the context diagram: Draw. Important highlights Pay attention that the elements are placed in columns. Or are our diagrams too detailed, and falling out of date quickly?

Is the tooling sufficient? Does everybody have access to the diagrams when needed? In-person and online training is available to help you introduce the C4 model, or scale C4 model knowledge, within your organisation. For design sessions, you might find a whiteboard or flip chart paper better for collaboration, and iterating quickly.

For long-lived documentation, the following modelling and diagramming tools can help create software architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model. Structurizr is a collection of tooling to create software architecture diagrams and documentation based upon the C4 model. Structurizr was started in by Simon Brown creator of the C4 model , and has grown into a community of tooling, much of which is open source.

Structurizr is unique in that it supports diagrams as code Java, Clojure,. Archi provides a way for you to create C4 model diagrams with ArchiMate. GUI-based On-premises Free. IcePanel is a structured diagramming tool that supports the C4 model. GUI-based Cloud Free and paid. GUI-based On-premises Paid. Gaphor has built-in support for the C4 model.

MooD has support for the C4 model via a set of blueprints. Astah has support for the C4 model via a C4 model plugin. Text-based Cloud On-premises Free. Dennis Laumen has created a C4 model stencil for OmniGraffle , that allows you to create diagrams using pre-built shapes. Visual Paradigm supports the C4 model via some pre-built shapes. Ferhat Kalinci has created some C4 model shapes for yEd. This website, example diagrams, explanatory text, and slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.

The C4 model and this website were created by Simon Brown - simonbrown simonbrown. It shows the people who use it, and the other software systems that the Internet Banking System has a relationship with. Personal Customers of the bank use the Internet Banking System to view information about their bank accounts, and to make payments. The Internet Banking System itself uses the bank's existing Mainframe Banking System to do this, and uses the bank's existing E-mail System to send e-mails to customers.

A colour coding has been used to indicate which software systems exist already the grey boxes. In this slightly modified example, the dashed line represents the boundary of the bank, and is used to illustrate what's inside vs what's outside of the bank. This is an example Container diagram for a fictional Internet Banking System. The Single-Page Application is an Angular application that runs in the customer's web browser, providing all of the Internet banking features.

Alternatively, customers can use the cross-platform Xamarin Mobile App, to access a subset of the Internet banking functionality.

The dashed line represents the boundary of the Internet Banking System, showing the containers light blue inside it. Additionally, a cylinder shape has been used to represent the database. This is an example Component diagram for a fictional Internet Banking System, showing some rather than all of the components within the API Application. The dashed line represents the boundary of the API Application, showing the components light blue inside it.

This is an example and partial UML class diagram for a fictional Internet Banking System, showing the code elements interfaces and classes that make up the MainframeBankingSystemFacade component. It shows that the component is made up of a number of classes, with the implementation details directly reflecting the code. Introduction Ask somebody in the building industry to visually communicate the architecture of a building and you'll be presented with site plans, floor plans, elevation views, cross-section views and detail drawings.

Abstractions In order to create these maps of your code, we first need a common set of abstractions to create a ubiquitous language that we can use to describe the static structure of a software system. Person A person represents one of the human users of your software system e.

Software System A software system is the highest level of abstraction and describes something that delivers value to its users, whether they are human or not. Container applications and data stores Not Docker! Client-side web application : A JavaScript application running in a web browser using Angular, Backbone. JS, jQuery, etc. Server-side console application : A standalone e. Serverless function : A single serverless function e. Amazon Lambda, Azure Function, etc.

Blob or content store : A blob store e. Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, etc. File system : A full local file system or a portion of a larger networked file system e. Shell script : A single shell script written in Bash, etc. Component The word "component" is a hugely overloaded term in the software development industry, but in this context a component is a grouping of related functionality encapsulated behind a well-defined interface. Core diagrams Visualising this hierarchy of abstractions is then done by creating a collection of Context , Container , Component and optionally Code e.

Level 1: System Context diagram A System Context diagram is a good starting point for diagramming and documenting a software system, allowing you to step back and see the big picture. Scope : A single software system. Recommended for most teams : Yes. Level 2: Container diagram Once you understand how your system fits in to the overall IT environment, a really useful next step is to zoom-in to the system boundary with a Container diagram.

Level 3: Component diagram Next you can zoom in and decompose each container further to identify the major structural building blocks and their interactions. Scope : A single container. Level 4: Code Finally, you can zoom in to each component to show how it is implemented as code; using UML class diagrams, entity relationship diagrams or similar. Scope : A single component. Supplementary diagrams Once you have a good understanding of the static structure, you can supplement the C4 diagrams to show other aspects.

System Landscape diagram The C4 model provides a static view of a single software system but, in the real-world, software systems never live in isolation. Scope : An enterprise. Dynamic diagram A dynamic diagram can be useful when you want to show how elements in a static model collaborate at runtime to implement a user story, use case, feature, etc.

Scope : One or more software systems. Notation The C4 model doesn't prescribe any particular notation. Software System. System Context diagram. Diagrams Every diagram should have a title describing the diagram type and scope e. Elements The type of every element should be explicitly specified e.

Person, Software System, Container or Component. Every element should have a short description, to provide an "at a glance" view of key responsibilities. Every container and component should have a technology explicitly specified.

Relationships Every line should represent a unidirectional relationship. Every line should be labelled, the label being consistent with the direction and intent of the relationship e. Try to be as specific as possible with the label, ideally avoiding single words like, "Uses".

Frequently asked questions What's the background behind the C4 model? What's the inspiration behind the C4 model? Isn't the C4 model a step backwards? Why are you reinventing UML? Why not just use UML? How many people use the C4 model? Why "container"? Scope of Software Architecture [6] Opinions vary as to the scope of software architectures:.

His book, Software Architecture Patterns, focuses on five architectures that are commonly used to organize software systems. The best way to plan new programs is to study them and understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Comparison of Other Common Architectural Patterns See Figure 3 The table given below summarizes the pros and cons of each architectural pattern. Figure 3. Software Architecture Vs. Software Design [8] Software architecture exposes the structure of a system while hiding the implementation details. Architecture also focuses on how the elements and components within a system interact with one other. Software design delves deeper into the implementation details of the system. Design concerns include the selection of data structures and algorithms, or the implementation details of individual components.

Architecture and design concerns often overlap. Rather than use hard and fast rules to distinguish between architecture and design, it makes sense to combine them. In some cases, decisions are clearly more architectural in nature. In other cases, decisions focus heavily on design and how it helps to realize that architecture. An important detail to note is that architecture is design, but not all design is architectural.

In practice, the architect is the one who draws the line between software architecture architectural design and detailed design non-architectural design.

There are no rules or guidelines that fit all cases—although, there have been attempts to formalize the distinction. Current trends in software architecture assume that the design evolves over time and that a software architect cannot know everything up front to fully architect a system. The design generally evolves during the implementation stages of the system.

The software architect continuously learns and tests the design against real world requirements. Impediments to Achieving Architectural Success [9]. Software Architecture.

The important stuff—whatever that is; this refers to the fact that software architects should concern themselves with those decisions that have high impact on the system and its stakeholders.