Systems architecture and high-performing systems

In the modern market, designing a high-performing system is an essential part of the business. It provides a better user experience and can enable more efficient operations, giving an advantage over competitors.

For software systems to be deemed high-performing, they must incorporate features such as:

• Efficient resource management;
• Reliability;
• Security;
• Scalability;
• High data throughput.

High-performance systems are not exclusive to particular industries; they are crucial components across various sectors, including finance, healthcare, gaming, and AI.

Different challenges require different patterns

Choosing the right architecture for the challenge is one of the crucial steps in system design. It defines how all the parts of our system will interact, how many loads it can take, the metal costs, etc. Next, we’ll look into some of the most common architectures used in the modern world.

Monolithic

An application is defined as monolithic if it contains all the application code in a single codebase. One of the disadvantages of using this architecture is that the entire codebase becomes tightly coupled. While this may be acceptable during the early stages of product development, as the team number grows and the application becomes larger and more complex, updating and working on the features becomes more challenging.

Asynchronous messaging

Asynchronous messaging is one of the most common architectures used when multiple services or applications need to interact with a message queue upon the occurrence of an event or interaction. In contrast to monolithic architecture, this approach provides decoupling and reduces dependencies between services. However, it also introduces additional considerations, such as eventual consistency, which implies that changes made in one service may lead to unintended consequences in other parts of the system.

Component-based architecture

This architecture provides a framework for building software based on reusable modules. Each component has well-defined functionality and can be stored as a library, allowing it to be easily integrated into an application without the need to modify other components. Utilizing reusable components speeds up the development of system parts, eliminating the need to add boilerplate code for repetitive operations. Another advantage is extensibility, which involves combining multiple components to create new behaviors. A good analogy to understand this pattern is to think of it as a set of Lego blocks.

Microservices

This pattern is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled and independently deployable services. Container usage is common when using this pattern. Some of the advantages it provides are simple components, support for multiple tech stacks, and autonomy for teams. However, having a distributed system comes with its own disadvantages, such as the potential for some operations to be extremely complex and inefficient, the risk of tight coupling between services and others.

These are just a couple of examples of different architectures, as there are many more that can be implemented, each bringing its own advantages to the table. Some of them include:

• Publish — subscribe
• MVC (Model — View — Controller)
• Event-driven architecture (EDA)
• Peer-to-peer (P2P)
• Layered architecture

Choosing the style

An architectural style is essentially a set of guidelines that defines how a system will be structured and organized, how its components interact with each other, the dependencies they have, and more. It also impacts non-functional aspects of our project, such as scalability, maintainability, security, etc. These characteristics are directly influenced by the architectural style we choose to implement.

One thing to consider is that although guidelines and conventions exist, they are meant to be used as a general philosophy, and the true potential of the style we use depends on how effectively we can leverage its different components. Some of the benefits we can take advantage of each style include:

• Reusability
• Modularity
• Maintainability
• Decoupling
• Resilience

In modern systems, it is common to adopt a hybrid architecture to leverage the various benefits and solve different problems within a generally structured architecture.

Design considerations

The performance of a software system can be described as its ability to execute its intended functions. To correctly evaluate and choose one or many architectures that will be implemented, we have to consider factors such as:

• Scalability: how well our system can handle an increase in workload and/or user traffic. This is important as a wrongly estimated or wrong approach to system scalability will directly impact the system’s performance.
• Resource utilization: how efficiently the application is using the available software or hardware resources:CPU, disk, memory, network bandwidth, disk I/O and more
• Throughput: How many requests our system can handle within a given time frame.
• Response time: How much time it takes for our system to provide a response to queries or user interactions.

Measuring performance

Software systems are inherently evolutive, and changes implemented can have a negative impact on their performance. To correctly measure the performance of our systems, we need to implement some Key Performance Indicators, which will provide us with insights on our system, such as:

• Response times;
• Throughput;
• Resource utilization;
• Reliability.

There are also some actions and tests that must be taken preventively, such as:

• Synthetic transaction testing;
• Stress testing;
• Load testing;
• Performance modeling;
• End-user experience monitoring.

Conclusion

Systems architecture is its own “universe” in terms of concepts and applications. Designing a reliable and high-performing system means that you must perform a deep analysis and have a good understanding of the product/service that is going to be exposed to the users. There’s no magical recipe that will work for all cases, and each scenario needs to be analyzed to determine which type, or types, of architecture will fit best.