Introduction
Importance of choosing the right architecture 🤔
Choosing the right software architecture is crucial for building scalable, maintainable, and high-performance applications. A well-structured architecture ensures flexibility, reduces technical debt, and improves development efficiency.
Possible Architectural Patterns:
1.) Microservices Architecture
Microservices Architecture breaks an application into small, independently deployable services that communicate via APIs. It's highly scalable and flexible, allowing each service to use different technologies. However, it introduces complexity in deployment and challenges in maintaining data consistency.
Example: A ProductService and OrderService built as separate ASP.NET Core Web APIs, each with its own database and deployed independently.
2.) Modular Monolith
Modular Monolith is a single-deployment application where the codebase is divided into well-structured, independent modules.
Unlike a traditional monolith, each module has clear boundaries and can evolve independently within the same process.
Use it when you need clean separation of concerns without the complexity of microservices.
Example: A large enterprise app with multiple business domains managed in separate modules.
3.) Monolithic Architecture
Monolithic Architecture is a single, unified codebase where all components (UI, business logic, data access) are tightly integrated.
It’s simple to develop and deploy but can become hard to scale and maintain as the application grows.
It can also be used in a console app for integrating multiple partners, where all integrations and logic reside in the same codebase.
Example: An ASP.NET MVC project with all logic in one solution and layers (Controllers, Services, Repositories) in the same deployment unit.
4.) Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design pattern where independent, reusable services perform specific business functions and communicate over a network, often via APIs or an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Its key principles include service reuse, loose coupling, and standardized communication (usually over HTTP, SOAP, or messaging protocols).
Pros: Reusability, scalability, integration-ready. Cons: Complexity, overhead from ESB, slower performance due to network calls.
Example: A PaymentService exposes a SOAP/REST API, and a separate OrderService consumes it via HttpClient.
5.) Event-Driven Architecture
Event-Driven Architecture enables services to react to events published to a broker (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) rather than being called directly.
Example: In C#, you might use EventHandler or MediatR for in-process, or Azure Service Bus/Kafka for distributed messaging.
Best for real-time, loosely-coupled systems like banking or IoT; improves scalability but adds complexity in debugging and tracing.
6.) Serverless Architecture
Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda in C# means writing small functions (e.g., in .NET 6) that get triggered by events like API Gateway requests, S3 uploads, or DynamoDB changes. You don’t manage servers—Lambda handles scaling, execution, and availability. It’s perfect for short-lived tasks like processing a payout or sending a notification.
Example, an AWS Lambda written in C# could handle an API request to validate a payment and store the result in a database, all without provisioning infrastructure.
7.) Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) focuses on modeling software around the business domain using well-defined structures. In a C# project, DDD helps isolate domain logic into clean, testable components like entities and aggregates. Bounded contexts align well with Microservices, allowing each service to own its domain, while Modular Monoliths use them to structure internal modules. This separation ensures better maintainability and domain integrity as the system scales.
