Chapter 1: Designing and Architecting the Enterprise Application

Enterprise applications are software solutions designed to solve large and complex problems for enterprise organizations. They enable Order-to-Fulfillment capabilities for enterprise customers in the IT, government, education, and public sectors. They empower them to digitally transform their businesses with capabilities such as product purchasing, payment processing, automated billing, and customer management. When it comes to enterprise applications, the number of integrations is quite high, and the volume of users is also very high as, typically, applications are targeted at a global audience.

To ensure that enterprise systems remain highly reliable, highly available, and highly performant, getting the design and architecture right is very important. Design and architecture form the foundation of any good software. They form the basis of the rest of the software development life cycle; therefore, it is very important to, first, get the right design to avoid any rework later, which could prove very expensive, depending on the changes required. So, you need a flexible, scalable, extensible, and maintainable design and architecture.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• A primer on common design principles and patterns
• Understanding common enterprise architectures
• Identifying enterprise application requirements (business and technical)
• Architecting an enterprise application
• Solution structuring for an enterprise application

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to start designing and architecting enterprise applications.