Certified Enterprise Architect Professional (CEAP) - Module 9: Application Architecture

Software Architecture vs Application Architecture:

While both terms are related to designing software systems, "software architecture" refers to the high-level design of an entire system, encompassing its components, interactions, and overall structure, while "application architecture" focuses specifically on the structure and design of a single application within that system, defining how its various components interact to achieve desired functionality; essentially, application architecture is a subset of software architecture concerned with the details of a particular application.

Example:

Enterprise architecture example:

Enterprise architecture create overall architecture of a e-commence platform which includes Hardware, RDBS, Cloud, Networking etc. 

Software architecture example:

Choosing a microservices architecture for an entire e-commerce platform, where different services (user management, product catalog, payment processing) are loosely coupled and can be independently developed and scaled. 

Application architecture example:

Designing the user interface, backend logic, and database interactions for the "cart" feature within that e-commerce platform.

Application architecture involves:

• Allows agility, reliability, and scalability
• It ensures an organisation can implement change effectively and swiftly.
• Simplify complicated applications by decomposing them into two or more applications.
• Identify logical applications and the most appropriate physical applications.
• Develop matrices across the architecture by relating applications to business service, business function, data, process, etc.
• Elaborate a set of Application Architecture views by examining how the application will function, capturing integration, migration, development, and operational concern

Application portfolio management:

An organisation and processes designed to catalogue, describe, and value the applications

of an enterprise, with a view to rationalisation or optimisation of those applications.

Applications Architecture Structural Model

1. A diagram that displays applications and the data flows that pass between them
2. Typically drawn using some kind of Data Flow Diagram
3. Where there are too many data flows, they may be abstracted into dependencies in some kind of dependency diagram

Applications Architecture Behavioural Model

1. A diagram that shows how a process works by illustrating the interaction of users and applications
2. Often drawn using some kind of interaction diagram
3. Frequently used to inspect where time is lost in or between application processing stages