Architecture Methodology: From Business to Technical Strategies

The article begins by questioning the essence of architecture, using everyday analogies such as a cafeteria worker handling peak recycling, a station guard managing Spring Festival passenger flow, and an electrician dealing with abnormal current to illustrate architectural thinking in daily life.

It then defines architecture and presents the business architecture methodology, divided into strategic-driven top-level architecture, strategic design (subdomain partitioning), and tactical design (domain modeling). The purpose of subdomain partitioning is to decompose complex problems, differentiate treatment of subdomains, and allocate resources accordingly.

An example of warehouse subdomain modeling is shown, illustrating the process from domain analysis to model definition.

The system architecture methodology section describes the evolution from a monolithic single-server setup through successive improvements: separating application and database, introducing local and distributed caches, implementing Nginx load balancing, database read-write separation, sharding by business, splitting large tables, multiple Nginx layers, DNS data-center load balancing, adding NoSQL and search engines, moving to microservices, and finally containerization.

Technical architecture strategies are detailed across reliability (failure isolation via sharding, redundancy, downgrading, fallback, rollback), scalability (decoupling, asynchronous event-driven, pluginization), performance (clustering, caching, parallelism, concurrency control), maintainability (monitoring and self-healing), security (data masking/encryption, authentication), and cost reduction (reuse of existing components).

Finally, the article covers architecture expression methods, introducing the 4+1 view model and discussing core architecture design principles.