There are several scopes that can be used to look at architecture:
- Enterprise architecture deals with the whole company or even a group of companies. It takes a holistic approach and is concerned about the strategy of whole enterprises. When thinking about enterprise architecture, you should be looking at how all the systems in a company behave and cooperate with each other. It's concerned about the alignment between business and IT.
- Solution architecture is less abstract than its enterprise counterpart. It stands somewhere in the middle between enterprise and software architecture. Usually, solution architecture is concerned with one specific system and the way it interacts with its surroundings. A solution architect needs to come up with a way to fulfill a specific business need, usually by designing a whole software system or modifying existing ones.
- Software architecture is even more concrete than solution architecture. It concentrates on a specific project, the technologies it uses, and how it interacts with other projects. A software architect is interested in the internals of the project's components.
- Infrastructure architecture is, as the name suggests, concerned about the infrastructure that the software will use. It defines the deployment environment and strategy, how the application will scale, failover handling, site reliability, and other infrastructure-oriented aspects.
Solution architecture is based on both software and infrastructure architectures to satisfy the business requirements. In the following sections, we will talk about both those aspects to prepare you for both small- and large-scale architecture design. Before we jump into that, let's also answer one fundamental question: why is architecture important?
