In a hurry? Or watch "Visualising software architecture with the C4 model". Ask somebody in the building industry to visually communicate the architecture of a building and you'll be presented with site plans, floor plans, elevation views, cross-section views and detail drawings.
In contrast, ask a software developer to communicate the software architecture of a software system using diagrams and you'll likely get a confused mess of boxes and lines As an industry, we do have the Unified Modeling Language UMLlandscapers 44057 model, ArchiMate and SysML, landscapers 44057 model, but asking whether these provide an effective way to communicate software architecture is often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown them out in favour of Landscapers In My Area 2019 much simpler "boxes and lines" landscapers 44057 model. Abandoning these modelling languages is one landscapers 44057 model but, perhaps in the race for agility, landscapers 44057 model, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually.
The C4 model was created as a way to help software development teams describe and communicate software architecture, both during up-front design sessions and when retrospectively documenting an existing codebase. It's a way to create maps of your code, at landscapers 44057 model levels of detail, in the same way you would use something like Google Maps landscapers 44057 model zoom in and out of an area you are interested in.
Like source code, Google Street View provides a very low-level and accurate view of a location. Navigating an unfamiliar environment becomes easier if you zoom out though, landscapers 44057 model.
Zooming out further will provide additional context you might not have been aware of. Different levels of zoom allow you to tell different stories to different audiences. Although primarily aimed at software architects and developers, the C4 landscapers 44057 model provides a way for software development teams to efficiently and effectively communicate their software architecture, at different levels of detail, telling different stories to different types of audience, when doing up front design or retrospectively documenting an existing codebase.
Level 1: A System Context diagram provides a starting point, showing how the software system in scope fits into the world around it. Level 2: A Container diagram zooms into the software system in scope, showing the high-level technical building blocks.
Level 3: A Component diagram zooms into an individual container, showing the components inside it. Level 4: A code e. UML class diagram can be used to zoom into an individual component, showing how that component is implemented. The C4 model is an "abstraction-first" approach to diagramming software architecture, based upon abstractions that reflect how software architects and developers think about landscapers 44057 model build software.
The small set of abstractions and diagram types makes the C4 model easy to learn and use. Good software architecture diagrams help to align everybody's understanding of the software being built, helping to therefore make the team more efficient. In order to create these maps of your code, we first need a common set of abstractions to create a ubiquitous language that we can use to describe the static structure of a landscapers 44057 model. The C4 model considers the static structures of a software system in terms of containerscomponents and code.
And people use the software systems that we build. A software system is made up of one or more containers landscapers 44057 model applications, mobile apps, landscapers 44057 model, desktop applications, databases, file systems, landscapers 44057 model, etceach of which contains one or more componentswhich in turn are implemented by one or more code elements e.
A visualisation of an example software architecture model, showing the hierarchical nature of the elements that make up the static structure, landscapers 44057 model. A person represents one of the human users of your software system e. A software system is the highest level of abstraction and describes something that delivers value to its users, whether they are human or not.
This includes the software system you are modelling, and the other software systems upon which your software system depends or vice versa.
In many cases, a software system is "owned by" a single software development team. Not Docker! In the C4 model, a container represents an application or a data store.
A container is something that needs to be running in order for the overall software system to work. In real terms, a container is something like:. A container is essentially a context or boundary inside which some code is executed or some data is stored. Because of this, communication between containers typically takes the form of an inter-process communication. The word "component" is a hugely overloaded term in the software development industry, but in this context a component is a grouping of related functionality encapsulated behind a well-defined interface.
If you're using a language landscapers 44057 model Java or Cthe simplest way to think of a component is that it's a landscapers 44057 model of implementation classes behind an interface. Aspects such as how those components are packaged e. An important point to note here is that all components inside a container typically execute in the same process space. Landscapers 44057 model the C4 model, components are not separately deployable units, landscapers 44057 model.
Visualising this hierarchy of landscapers 44057 model is then done by creating a collection of ContextContainerlandscapers 44057 model, Component and optionally Code e. UML landscapers 44057 model diagrams. This is where the C4 model gets its name. See example diagram, key, and narrative. A System Context diagram is a good starting point for diagramming and documenting a software system, allowing you to step back and see the big picture. Draw a diagram showing your system as a box in the centre, surrounded by its users and the other systems that it interacts.
Detail isn't important here as this is your zoomed out view showing a big picture of the system landscape. The focus should be on people actors, roles, personas, etc and software systems rather than technologies, landscapers 44057 model, protocols and other low-level details. It's the sort of diagram that you could show to non-technical people.
Primary elements : The software system in scope. Supporting elements : People landscapers 44057 model. Intended audience : Everybody, both technical and non-technical people, inside and outside of the software development team. Once you landscapers 44057 model how your system fits in to the overall IT environment, a really useful next step is to zoom-in to the system boundary with a Container diagram.
A "container" is something like a server-side web application, single-page application, desktop application, mobile app, landscapers 44057 model, database schema, file system. The Container diagram shows the high-level shape of the software architecture and how responsibilities are distributed across it. It also shows the major technology choices and how the containers communicate with one.
Primary elements : Containers within the software system in scope. Supporting elements : People and software systems directly connected to the containers. Notes : This diagram says nothing about deployment scenarios, clustering, replication, failover. Next you can zoom in and decompose each container further to identify the major structural building blocks and their interactions. Primary elements : Components within the container in landscapers 44057 model. Supporting elements : Containers within the software system in scope plus people and software systems directly connected to the components, landscapers 44057 model.
Intended audience : Software architects and developers. See example diagram and narrative. Finally, you can zoom in to each component to show how it is implemented as code; using UML class diagrams, entity relationship diagrams or similar. This is an optional level landscapers 44057 model detail and is often available on-demand from tooling such as IDEs.
Ideally this diagram would be automatically generated using tooling e. This level of detail is not recommended for anything but the most important or complex components. Primary elements : Code elements e. Once you have a good understanding of the static structure, you can supplement the C4 diagrams to show other aspects. The C4 model provides a static view Landscapers Seattle Depot of a single software system but, in the real-world, software systems never live in isolation.
For this reason, and particularly if you are responsible for a collection of software systems, it's often useful to understand how landscapers 44057 model of these software systems fit together within the bounds of an enterprise. To do this, simply add another diagram that sits "on top" of the C4 diagrams, to show the system landscape from an IT perspective. Essentially this is a high-level map of the software systems at the enterprise level, with a C4 drill-down for each software system of.
From a practical perspective, a system landscape diagram is really just a system context diagram without a specific focus on a particular software. Primary elements : People and software systems related to the enterprise in scope. Intended audience : Technical and non-technical people, inside and outside of the software development team.
A dynamic diagram can be useful when you want to show how elements in a static model collaborate at runtime to implement a user story, landscapers 44057 model, use case, feature. It is similar to a UML sequence diagram although it allows a free-form arrangement landscapers 44057 model diagram elements with numbered interactions to indicate ordering.
Scope : An enterprise, software system or container. Primary and supporting elements : Depends on the diagram scope; enterprise see System Landscape diagramsoftware system see System Context or Container diagramscontainer see Component diagram. This deployment diagram is based upon a UML deployment diagramalthough simplified slightly to show the mapping between containers and deployment nodes. A deployment node is something like physical infrastructure e.
IaaS, PaaS, a virtual machinecontainerised infrastructure e. Deployment nodes can be nested. You may also want to include infrastructure nodes such as DNS services, load balancers, firewalls.
Primary elements : Deployment nodes, software system instances, and container instances. Supporting elements Landscapers Preston Quotes : Infrastructure nodes used in the deployment of the software. The C4 model doesn't prescribe any particular notation. A simple notation that works well on whiteboards, paper, sticky notes, index cards and a variety of diagraming tools is as follows.
You can then use colour and shapes to supplement the diagram, either to add additional information or simply to make the diagram more aesthetically pleasing. Although the example diagrams above are created using a "boxes and lines" notation, the core diagrams can be illustrated using UML with the appropriate use of packages, components and stereotypes.
The resulting UML diagrams do tend to lack the same degree of descriptive text though, because adding such text isn't possible or easy with some UML tools. Here are three examples of a System Context, Container and Component diagram for comparison, landscapers 44057 model. Although the C4 model is an abstraction-first approach and notation independent, you still need to ensure that your diagram notation makes sense, and that the diagrams are comprehensible.
A good way to think about this is to ask yourself whether each diagram can stand alone, and be mostly understood without a narrative.
You can use this short software architecture diagram review checklist to help. Here are some collections of landscapers 44057 model software How To Landscape Your Front Yard Model architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model.
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