Types of Architectures#
The major architectural patterns systems take. The operator recognises them on target (monoliths to pivot inside, microservices to enumerate one boundary at a time, event-driven infrastructure that leaks through its queues) and chooses among them when building tooling that has to outlive a single mission.
The categories overlap. A real system can be a modular monolith deployed as a serverless function, communicating via event-driven patterns, with the internal code organized in a hexagonal layout. Treat the vocabulary as orthogonal axes, not a single classification.
mindmap
root((Types of<br/>Architectures))
Monolith
Modular Monolith
SOA
Microservices
Serverless
Event-Driven
CQRS
Saga
Hexagonal
Clean
Onion
Layered
MVC
N-Tier
Peer-to-Peer
Pipeline
Batch
Streaming
A single deployable unit containing the whole application. One repo, one build, one runtime.
Coarse business services integrated through a central enterprise service bus. The ancestor of microservices.
Many small, independently deployable services communicating over the network.
Code on demand, platform-managed compute, scale to zero, pay per execution.
Components communicate by publishing and subscribing to events on a broker.
Ports and Adapters. Application core abstracted from the outside world.
Presentation, business, data layers. Each layer depends only on the one below.
No central server. Every node is both client and server.
Data through a sequence of stages, each transforming and passing forward.