Architecture as Code

Chapter 2. Architecture and Source Code

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Software architecture represents the logical and physical structure of a software system or product. The logical architecture of a software system identifies relationships between its components and how the source code is structured, whereas the physical architecture represents the deployed artifacts of the system, such as services, gateways, message brokers, and so on.

How a system is implemented can affect its architecture, and hence the corresponding architectural characteristics it must support. For example, if a given system requires high levels of scalability and elasticity, its architect must take care to minimize the amount of internal memory the services use, which can affect the system’s ability to create additional instances of that service based on the amount of memory available in the virtual machine. A 500MB internal in-memory cache contained in a service instance might not seem like a lot, but when 10 instances of that service start up, that ...