[Tutor] System architecture

[Alan Gauld]

On 24/12/2023 18:22, Lilia Georgieva wrote:

> What are good resources for system architecture? I struggle with more
> complex designs and would like to learn more about how to approach the
> design.

That is a huge topic and even the term "system architecture" is
multi-layered and means different things in different contexts.
For example a programmer may think it means the structure of
a program in terms of modules, classes, functions and data.

A Operations person will think in terms of the physical deployment
onto clients, servers and virtualised machines, databases,
external sources, firewalls, networks etc...

But an Enterprise Architect, at the other end of the scale,
thinks of it as a collection of systems cooperating to achieve
some enterprise goal or function (eg billing or payroll or
manufacturing)

> My case study is big data processing but I am really asking about pointers
> to the generic approach.

Narrowing the domain certainly helps to identify approaches.
And common big data architectures and frameworks exist - eg Hadoop.

There are many books and web sites dedicated to systems
architecture and several methodologies and notations to
support it. (eg. UML, SSADM, SDL, BPAL etc.) There are
even formal mathematical approaches that are usually
reserved for mission or safety critical subsets of the
system (eg Z, OCL or VDM).

And there are at least a couple of formal qualifications
that you can study for - TOGAF is the one I know best
but Zachman and Microsoft also do schemes.

Coming back to the typical users of this mailing list
the best bet is most likely one of the many books on
software design/architecture.

I'll highlight a few that I personally like but I'm
sure there are others out there (and my preference
is for OO design so that shows in the list!)

Grady Booch - Object Oriented Design with Applications
Jackson - System Development
Fowler - UML Distilled
Malveau/Mowbry - Software Architecture Bootcamp
Peter Coad - Object Models; Strategies, Patterns and Applications
Cook - Building Enterprise Information Architectures

And for general priciples of software construction,
including architectural things:

Bentley - Programming Pearls
Hunt/Thomas - The Pragmatic Programmer
McConnell - Code Complete

There are dedicated books on Big Data but since the only
one I've read is the Dummies Guide(don't laugh!) I can't
really comment.

Others will doubtless have their own favourites.

And of course there are whole web sites dedicated to
the topic. The Open Group has several sections of their
site geared to architecture and design. ZIFA coveres Zachman
IBM also has a good section on their site.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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