Software Architecture for the Enterprise Architect

Explore UML, the unified modeling language, and visualize system design with structural diagrams like class and component diagrams, behavioral diagrams like activity and use-case diagrams, and sequence and communication diagrams.

Learn Crichton's four plus one model to describe enterprise software architecture from multiple stakeholders, through development, logical, physical, process, and scenarios views with key UML diagrams.

Explore lucid chart, a web-based tool for UML diagrams with free option. Sign up for a free account, use templates, and note the 60-object limit and three active documents.

Develop a practical component diagram for an ecommerce system, showing components, interfaces, and their interactions, and explore breakdown of the order processor in Lucidchart.

Create and analyze a class diagram in Lucidchart for a booking system, detailing agents, customers, bookings, and a shared user superclass, with bidirectional relationships, multiplicities, and inheritance.

Develop activity diagrams to model dynamic system behavior and control flow, including parallel branches, using Lucidchart to map the login page from start to end.

Learn to model a website's deployment with a lucidchart deployment diagram, showing client, front-end, back-end and database servers, plus software components, interfaces, and dependencies.

Model a blogging platform with a use case diagram, detailing actors (website user, blog owner, moderator) and interactions (comment on blogs, blog posts, private messages, moderation) using lucid chart.

Explore high level architectural patterns and principles used in today’s enterprise systems. See how technology-agnostic patterns provide reusable solutions, and learn when to apply multiple patterns to inform system design.

Explore multitiered architecture, detailing the presentation, business, and data access layers, three-tier and four-tier variants, and how layer isolation guides responsibilities.

Describe the client-server architecture as a distributed model where servers provide services that clients request. Compare light and fed clients and note centralized security and scalability.

Explore how the model-view-controller architecture splits an application into model, view, and controller to promote low coupling, high cohesion, and parallel development.

Explore service oriented architecture, where loosely coupled, self-contained services intercommunicate as black boxes to enable reusability and parallel development, with trade-offs in management and communication overhead.

Explore microservices architecture as a fine-grained, lightweight variation of service oriented architecture that achieves low coupling and scalability through web APIs, shared memory, or message buses.

Collaborate with domain experts to apply domain-driven design, establish a ubiquitous language, and model value objects, entities, and aggregate routes for aligned software and business needs.

Learn how event driven architecture uses producers that generate events and decoupled consumers that listen, with either a publish-subscribe model or a log-based event store, enabling scalable, real-time processing.