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Architecture is the process and the product of  planning designing and constructing buildings   or other structures. A good design can make  a structure survive and be admired for years   or fail even to stand. It's the job of  the architect to join both art and science   to make sure all the pieces of a building  come together in a good solution.   Similar to architects as a software engineer  you will also need to mix art and science   to deliver solutions in a satisfactory way but  instead of bricks you will solve them with code Hi there I'm christian and you're watching the  A Dev' Story. Today I will be starting a new   series of videos covering software architecture  in a practical way. In this series of videos I   will be covering many concepts and fundamentals of  software architecture so hopefully by the end of   it you will be more prepared to tackle software  design challenges, have better discussions   and even be more prepared for a technical  interview. So without further ado let's start Software architecture has many definitions one  of the most famous one is from Ralph Johnson   where he says: "architecture is about  the important stuff, whatever that is"   but... what is important stuff? In the  software architecture we focus more on the   structure more than implementation details.  Software architecture is also about making   the expensive choices that are costly to change  after they are implemented. It's also about making   explicit the core decisions that will allow  the software to have high quality. Concepts   are better understood in practice, so let's  build an e-commerce site and see how that looks So, for example in our e-commerce site we need to  allow our users to do certain things like search   the inventory, check reviews, buy a product,  review past orders and maybe other features   as well. These are the functional requirements  of the application. Besides of what the system   should do we also need to focus on how should  the system behave. These are also called the   non-functional requirements. These are sometimes  defined as the "-ilities" that the system can have   like: functionality, reliability, usability,  efficiency, these kind of things. For example,   in our e-commerce site let's say that we wanted it  to be maintainable for several years and this is   a maintainability requirement; we also want to be  able to serve millions of users: in this case it's   scalability; we also want to make it available  24/7: which is a reliability to make sure that the   system is very stable. We also want to have good  response latency: which is efficiency; and we can   have many others. Finally, besides functional  and non-functional requirements you may also   have additional restrictions that will limit the  options that you will have for your architecture.   So, for example, we could have some legal  compliance, costs, time to market, standards, etc.   several restrictions that will limit the number  of options that we will have to design our system.   Let's say in our e-commerce site we need  to comply with the European Privacy Law:   GDPR. So, with that we need to take into  consideration architecture how to handle that. So after you get the context, you know all  the things that the system needs to do,   how it should behave and what restrictions are in  place that you need to take into consideration. So   after you have all of these things, you need  to prioritize them. S ome requirements and   restrictions will conflict between them. For  example, if you have a strict time to market,   maybe you need to drop some features. There  can also be other things like non-functional   requirements that need to be prioritized. So for  example, in our case of the e-commerce site, we   might not care too much about portability because  we will have a strong control of where it's going   to be deployed the application and after it's  deployed in there we don't plan to move it to   other platforms. So we could drop portability in  favor of scalability or maintainability. So after   you have prioritized the list and you have made  this trade-off you need to think about if it's   acceptable or not so after it's acceptable  then you start designing the architecture.   How do you start designing the system? So the  first thing is once you have it prioritized start   with one important thing at a time. If you try  to tackle everything at the beginning and trying   to think about all the possible scenarios in the  future, you might end up having an over-engineered   solution and this is not good because it is an  unnecessarily complex system. There is also an   acronym for that is YAGNI: You Ain't Going to Need  It. So if you are not sure about something or if   it's not prioritized then try not to tackle at  first. Try to postpone it to when you have better   context and can make a better decision about it.  Now that you have this you might start thinking   about what are the possible architectures that  might fit your system. For that, a good book   that I recommend and that is useful for me, is  this free ebook from O'Reilly that is: "Software   Architecture Patterns". It is a good book to get  a grasp of different architectural approaches   and you can see several architectural patterns  like: Layered, Event Driven, Microkernel,   Microservices   and Space based. This book shows pros and cons  of each of these patterns and might help you at   the beginning when you're designing the system  what to look for and what would be best for your   system based on your current requirements. So we  have decided what are some of the features that   we want to have our system implemented. We have  also mentioned that maintainability is one of the   non-functional requirements that is very important  for us, so with that we can start designing our   system and we can take for example a Layered  approach. We could have a Database or a Storage   Layer where we would sort data; then we will  have a Logic Layer where we will have the backend   servers that will be taking care of handling  any business logic that we want to handle;   and then the Visualization part or UI, where we'll  be allowing the users to interact with the system and this is how we get to the Layered Architecture So here we have defined the architecture  with the structure that the system will have.   The features can then be implemented following  this layered architecture. And if you want to   learn a little bit more about how to implement the  features in a scalable nice way then I recommend   you to check out my other video about design  patterns. It's very typical in web applications   to use a layered architecture but it's not the  only architectural pattern that we can use.   There is no silver bullet so make sure that in  your context you look to different approaches and   pick the architecture pattern that would better  fit your use case. It's also normal that the   architecture would evolve over time and sometimes  even in unintended ways that would make expensive   changes to the architecture. So you need to make  a balance about foreseeing the certain things   that you will need to cover versus the things  that you need to prioritize in the short term.   If you try to tackle everything then you can  end up having an overengineered solution.   One of the most expensive things can be scaling.  So, in our case, we already have the architecture:   How can we make it scale to serve  millions and millions of user requests?   For that check out my next video. And  that's it for today! Thank you very much   for watching and if you liked the video don't  forget to click the like button, subscribe,   share it. And if I missed something, or you want  me to explain something a little bit better don't   forget to mention it in the comments [section]  below thank you very much see you next time.