Chapter 28. They Don’t Build ’Em Quite Like That Anymore
No One Lives in a Foundation
The Great Pyramid at 30% completion: effort completion, that is
The great pyramids are impressive buildings and attract hordes of tourists even several millennia after their construction. The attraction results not only from the engineering marvel, such as the perfect alignment and balance, but also from the fact that pyramids are quite rare. Besides the US one-dollar bill, you’ll find them only in Egypt, Central America, and IT organizations!
Why IT Architects Love Pyramids
Pyramids are a fairly common sight in IT architecture diagrams and tend to give architects, especially the ones nearer to the penthouse, a noticeable sense of satisfaction. In most cases, the pyramid diagram indicates a layering concept with a base layer that includes functionality commonly needed by the upper layers. For example, the base layer could contain generic functions, while the next layer up would contain industry-specific functions, followed by functionality for specific business functions, and being topped off with customer-specific configuration (Chapter 11).
Layering is a very popular and useful concept in systems architecture because it constrains dependencies between system components to flow in a single direction, as opposed to a Big Ball of Mud (Chapter 8). Depicting the layers in the shape of a pyramid ...
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