Technical architecture

For large-scale applications, we use modern architectures based on services, which are small, independent units of functionality with a single responsibility.

Take your online banking app, for example. It can be broken down into different services like logging in, making payments or applying for a loan. When each of these services runs separately, they can scale up when needed. There might be a lot of people logging in around lunch time putting pressure on that services.

When each of these services are distributed across multiple servers, they can scale up as required. Crucially, if one server fails, others can take over. Even if there was a catastrophic failure where a collection of services were to go down, the entire application would remain unaffected. That’s because it’s been designed without a single point of failure. We call this building horizontally to protect the application.

So a technical architect’s job is to figure out exactly what services are needed. We look at the responsibility for each unit of functionality and map out the connections to other services. The developers are then in the best position to build those services, knowing what they need to perform and how they communicate with each other.