Unveiling the Foundations: An Introduction to Architecture Patterns

8 min readMar 25, 2024

Hi 👋 again! Today, in this blog post, we’ll delve into the fundamentals of architecture and explore various types of patterns. I’ve been studying this topic for several months now, so I wanted to share my insights here. Let’s dive in!

What is Architecture 🧐

Architecture is the art and science of planning and creating buildings or systems. It’s not just about putting things together, but also about the creativity and planning involved in the process. It includes everything from coming up with ideas and sketches to actually building and designing the structures.

Specifically ,Software architecture is the foundation of a software system.It refers to the way a software system is set up and organised. It involves figuring out how different parts of the software connect and work together. Each part includes the different pieces of software, how they relate to each other, and their unique characteristics.

Why Architecture is Required 🤔

Architecture helps stakeholders to understand and analyse how the system will achieve all the essential qualities such as agility, testability, availability, scalability , reusability , deployability , observability , security , performance and so on ...

Effective software architecture ensures that the system is easily understandable and supports smooth development, maintenance, and deployment. It reduces the expenses associated with software development and enhances developers’ efficiency. A properly designed system prevents redundant code, streamlines the merging of components from various teams, and enhances the software’s overall quality and security.

Now that we have an understanding of what software architecture is and why it’s necessary, let’s take a quick look at its various types.

Architecture Patterns

In the software industry, various patterns exist to cater to different requirements. However, we’ll focus only on some widely recognized patterns.

Monolith Architecture :

Monolithic architecture is a traditional approach to building software where the entire application is developed as a single, unified unit. In this architecture, all components of the application, such as the user interface, business logic, and data access layer, are tightly integrated and deployed as a single package.

Monolithic architectures are characterized by their simplicity and ease of development and deployment, but they can become challenging to scale and maintain as the application grows in size and complexity.

Microkernel or Plugin Architecture :

The microkernel architecture pattern mainly consists of two components.

1. Core System
2. Plug-ins modules

Application logic is divided between independent plug-in modules and the basic core system. That provides extensibility, flexibility, and isolation of application features and custom processing logic.

A good example of microkernel architecture can be eclipse text editor , when you install it its just a simple text editor but it become a very powerful tool as you start adding plugins as per your requirement.

Event Driven Architecture:

Event-driven architecture refers to a software design pattern where independent applications can communicate by sending and receiving events through an event broker, often referred to as modern messaging-oriented middleware. This allows for asynchronous communication between the applications.

Event-driven architectures have three key components: event producers, event broker, and event consumers. A producer publishes an event to the broker, which filters and pushes the events to consumers. Producer services and consumer services are decoupled, which allows them to be scaled, updated, and deployed independently.

Event driven architecture lets information flow between applications, microservices, and connected devices in near real-time manner as events occur throughout the business.

This architecture is good where parallelism is more important and no/less synchronous communication is required. There are many big organisations are using this design for e.g. Netflix , Unilever ,Uber , Amazon and so on .

Pipeline (Pipe & Filter) Architecture:

The pipeline architecture stands out as a widely adopted style in software system design. Recognized also as pipes and filters, it involves a sequence of distinct steps executed in a predictable order. This approach differs from the layered architecture, including the model-view-controller pattern.

In this pattern a pipe is a message queue and message can be anything. A filter is a process, thread, or other component that perpetually reads messages from an input pipe, one at a time, processes each message, then writes the result to an output pipe. Thus, it is possible to form pipelines of filters connected by pipes.

This pattern finds its primary application in the integration of multiple systems, especially when there’s a requirement to transfer data from one system to another as input.

As compared to event driven architecture this patterns provides synchronous data filtering where as in event driven architecture we have async even processing .

It is always unidirectional whereas event driven architecture can be bi-directional .

Microservices Architecture :

Microservice architecture is an approach to software development where a large application is broken down into small, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. Each service typically performs a specific function and communicates with other services through well-defined APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

These services are designed to be loosely coupled, meaning changes made to one service do not necessarily affect others and each of them is owned by small, self-contained teams.

Microservice architecture is protocol-aware and heterogeneous interpretability, offering flexibility to utilise the most suitable technologies independently for different components of the application.

The microservice architecture enables an organisation to deliver large, complex applications rapidly, frequently, reliably and sustainably — a necessity for competing and winning in today’s world.

Microservice is a label not description

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) :

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach to software development that utilizes services to construct business applications. Each service offers a specific business function, and they can interact with each other regardless of platform or programming language differences. SOA enables developers to reuse services across various systems or combine multiple independent services to accomplish intricate tasks.

Service oriented architecture is protocol-agnostic and heterogeneous interpretability, offering flexibility to utilise the most suitable technologies independently for different components of the application.

Each business service contains a business functionality and business related rules , these are abstract and owned by business team. It contains the specific tasks or operations that the service is designed to perform, as well as the data it manages or processes. The scope may also include any dependencies or interactions with other services within the SOA ecosystem.

Process choreographer and Service orchestrator involve managing processes that involve multiple participants, where messages flow in various directions based on a complex set of rules. Choreography and orchestration aim to coordinate and control these activities. They address this challenge by imposing structure on how message exchanges are depicted and organising the overall process using appropriate control flow patterns.

Enterprise services are integrated at enterprise level they are coarse-grained or granular services. These services are designed to support the various business functions and processes across different departments and units within the organisation. They are typically reusable, interoperable, and aligned with the strategic goals of the enterprise.

Application services are fine-grained application services ,the scope of an application Service is typically involves providing specific functionality or business capabilities within an application or across multiple applications for example data validations, accessing external resources.

Infrastructure services primarily revolves around providing essential support for the deployment, management, and operation of SOA-based applications, for e.g. Service Registry and Discovery, Monitoring and Management etc.

Service Based Architecture :

The service based architecture is similar to microservice architecture but not exactly same. The main difference comes in service granularity level .

In Service based architecture services have less granularity than microservices but more granularity than monolith

Service-based architectures consist of tens of deployable services, rather than the hundreds or thousands advocated by microservice proponents. These services may have separate data-stores, or may still share a single monolithic datastore.

Service based architecture have better performance than microservice architecture because it requires less http calls to communicate with other services (as scope of each service component is wider than microservice so the service will contain many modules inside itself ).

We’ve reached the conclusion of our brief introduction to various architecture patterns. These are just a few of the widely adopted patterns; there are many more examples, such as:

Space based Architecture pattern
Server-less Architecture (Backend as a Service)
Domain Specific Architecture

Conclusion

In conclusion, architecture plays a crucial role in software development, serving as the blueprint for creating robust and scalable systems. By providing a structured framework, architecture enables developers to understand, design, and build complex software solutions effectively. Throughout this blog, we’ve explored the fundamental concepts of architecture, highlighting its necessity and benifits of a good architectural design .

Understanding architecture patterns is essential for developers as they offer proven solutions to common design challenges. From monolithic architectures to microservices, each pattern presents unique advantages and considerations. By selecting the most suitable pattern for a given project, developers can optimize performance, enhance flexibility, and streamline development processes.

While we’ve covered several prominent architecture patterns in this introduction, it’s important to recognize that the field of software architecture is vast and continuously evolving. There are countless other patterns and approaches tailored to specific use cases and requirements. Therefore, as developers continue their journey in software development, exploring and mastering different architecture patterns will be invaluable in creating efficient, scalable, and resilient systems.