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What do we talk about when we talk about architecture?
As with any metaphor, describing software through the lens of architecture can hide as much as it can reveal. It can both promise more than it can deliver and deliver more than it promises.
The obvious appeal of architecture is structure, and structure is something that dominates the paradigms and discussions of software development— components, classes, functions, modules, layers, and services, micro or macro. But the gross structure of so many software systems often defies either belief or understanding—Enterprise Soviet schemes destined for legacy, improbable Jenga towers reaching toward the cloud, archaeological layers buried in a big- ball-of-mud slide. It’s not obvious that software structure obeys our intuition the way building structure does.
Buildings have an obvious physical structure, whether rooted in stone or concrete, whether arching high or sprawling wide, whether large or small, whether magnificent or mundane. Their structures have little choice but to respect the physics of gravity and their materials. On the other hand—except in its sense of seriousness—software has little time for gravity. And what is software made of? Unlike buildings, which may be made of bricks, concrete,
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Foreword
wood, steel, and glass, software is made of software. Large software constructs are made from smaller software components, which are in turn made of smaller software components still, and so on. It’s coding turtles all the way down.
When we talk about software architecture, software is recursive and fractal in nature, etched and sketched in code. Everything is details. Interlocking levels of detail also contribute to a building’s architecture, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about physical scale in software. Software has structure—many structures and many kinds of structures—but its variety eclipses the range of physical structure found in buildings. You can even argue quite convincingly that there is more design activity and focus in software than in building architecture—in this sense, it’s not unreasonable to consider software architecture more architectural than building architecture!
But physical scale is something humans understand and look for in the world. Although appealing and visually obvious, the boxes on a PowerPoint diagram are not a software system’s architecture. There’s no doubt they represent a particular view of an architecture, but to mistake boxes for the big picture— for the architecture—is to miss the big picture and the architecture: Software architecture doesn’t look like anything. A particular visualization is a choice, not a given. It is a choice founded on a further set of choices: what to include; what to exclude; what to emphasize by shape or color; what to de-emphasize through uniformity or omission. There is nothing natural or intrinsic about one view over another.
Although it might not make sense to talk about physics and physical scale in software architecture, we do appreciate and care about certain physical constraints. Processor speed and network bandwidth can deliver a harsh verdict on a system’s performance. Memory and storage can limit the ambitions of any code base. Software may be such stuff as dreams are made on, but it runs in the physical world.
This is the monstrosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite, and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.
—William Shakespeare
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