Architecture Styles
System-level organising shapes, and how they differ from problem-level patterns.
4 to work through
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intermediate Multiple choice
A browser-based design tool in Canva's mould lets users export a 40-page document to PDF, a 90-second animation to MP4 or a print-ready file. Export work takes anywhere from 3 seconds to 11 minutes, about 60000 a day, bursting around 09:00 in each region. All three run inside the synchronous web tier today and p99 export requests are killed by the load balancer at 60 seconds. Which architecture style should the export path use?
3 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
A news organisation runs a normal publishing platform for most of the year and an entirely different traffic profile on election night. Which architecture style should the read path use, and how does that differ from the style appropriate to the newsroom's editing tools?
2 min answer -
advanced
A developer-deployment platform must run builds, schedule long-lived services, stream logs and provision databases. Which architectural style fits, and what is the most common mistake in choosing?
1 min answer -
advanced
You are choosing an architecture style for a new B2B SaaS product. Six engineers. Enterprise customers with data residency requirements in three regions. Which style and why?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Architecture Style
A system-level organising shape — layered, modular monolith, service-based, microservices, event-driven, space-based — chosen for the properties it m…
conceptStyle versus Pattern
The distinction between a system-wide organising structure and a reusable solution to a recurring problem within it.
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Fundamentals
General material on what solution architecture is and what an architect is accountable for.
Requirements to Constraints
Turning stated requirements into the constraints that actually bound a design.
Functional vs Non-Functional
Behaviour versus quality of behaviour, and why only the second constrains structure.
Architectural Drivers
The small subset of requirements whose change would force the structure to change.
Quality Attributes
Availability, latency, throughput, security, cost — expressed as testable scenarios.
Architecture Principles
Durable agreed rules that rule options out, stated with rationale and implications.
Coupling
How much one component must know about, or change alongside, another.
Cohesion
Whether the things inside a boundary belong together and change for the same reason.
Modularity
Composing a system from parts that can be understood and replaced independently.
Separation of Concerns
Organising so that a change to one concern touches one place.
Abstraction & Encapsulation
Hiding mechanism behind contract, and protecting invariants by owning state.
Evolutionary Architecture
Designing for guided incremental change rather than for correctness on day one.
Fitness Functions
Automated checks that an architectural characteristic still holds.
Architecture Documentation
What to write down, at what altitude, and what nobody will ever read.
Conway's Law
Systems mirroring the communication structure of the organisation that builds them.
Trade-off Fundamentals
Why every architecture is a set of purchases, and how to state what you gave up.
Technical Constraints
Existing estate, skills, licences and platforms as inputs rather than obstacles.
Architecture Roles
Solution, enterprise, domain and platform architecture, and where each is accountable.
Reference Models
Shared conceptual frames — layering, tiers, viewpoints — and their limits.