Book Image

Software Architecture with C++

By : Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski

Book Image

Software Architecture with C++

By: Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski

Overview of this book

Software architecture refers to the high-level design of complex applications. It is evolving just like the languages we use, but there are architectural concepts and patterns that you can learn to write high-performance apps in a high-level language without sacrificing readability and maintainability. If you're working with modern C++, this practical guide will help you put your knowledge to work and design distributed, large-scale apps. You'll start by getting up to speed with architectural concepts, including established patterns and rising trends, then move on to understanding what software architecture actually is and start exploring its components. Next, you'll discover the design concepts involved in application architecture and the patterns in software development, before going on to learn how to build, package, integrate, and deploy your components. In the concluding chapters, you'll explore different architectural qualities, such as maintainability, reusability, testability, performance, scalability, and security. Finally, you will get an overview of distributed systems, such as service-oriented architecture, microservices, and cloud-native, and understand how to apply them in application development. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build distributed services using modern C++ and associated tools to deliver solutions as per your clients' requirements.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Conventions used

Section 1: Concepts and Components of Software Architecture

Section 1: Concepts and Components of Software Architecture

Free Chapter

Importance of Software Architecture and Principles of Great Design

Importance of Software Architecture and Principles of Great Design

Technical requirements

Understanding software architecture

Different ways to look at architecture

Learning the importance of proper architecture

Accidental architecture

Exploring the fundamentals of good architecture

Architecture context

Business and technical environments

Developing architecture using Agile principles

Domain-driven design

The philosophy of C++

Following the SOLID and DRY principles

Single responsibility principle

Open-closed principle

Liskov substitution principle

Interface segregation principle

Dependency inversion principle

Coupling and cohesion

Further reading

Architectural Styles

Architectural Styles

Technical requirements

Deciding between stateful and stateless approaches

Stateless and stateful services

Understanding monoliths—why they should be avoided, and recognizing exceptions

Understanding services and microservices

Benefits and disadvantages of microservices

Characteristics of microservices

Microservices and other architectural styles

Scaling microservices

Transitioning to microservices

Exploring event-based architecture

Common event-based topologies

Understanding layered architecture

Backends for Frontends

Learning module-based architecture

Further reading

Functional and Nonfunctional Requirements

Functional and Nonfunctional Requirements

Technical requirements documentation from sources, you must have

Understanding the types of requirements

Functional requirements

Nonfunctional requirements

Quality attributes

Recognizing architecturally significant requirements

Indicators of architectural significance

Hindrances in recognizing ASRs and how to deal with them

Gathering requirements from various sources

Knowing the context

Knowing existing documentation

Knowing your stakeholders

Gathering requirements from stakeholders

Documenting requirements

Documenting the context

Documenting the scope

Documenting functional requirements

Documenting nonfunctional requirements

Managing the version history of your documentation

Documenting requirements in Agile projects

Documenting architecture

Understanding the 4+1 model

Understanding the C4 model

Documenting architecture in Agile projects

Choosing the right views to document

Functional view

Information view

Concurrency view

Development view

Deployment and operational views

Generating documentation

Generating requirements documentation

Generating diagrams from code

Generating (API) documentation from code

Further reading

Section 2: The Design and Development of C++ Software

Section 2: The Design and Development of C++ Software

Architectural and System Design

Architectural and System Design

Technical requirements

Understanding the peculiarities of distributed systems

Different service models and when to use them

On-premises model

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model

Platform as a Service (PaaS) model

Software as a Service (SaaS) model

Function as a Service (FaaS) model and serverless architecture

Avoiding the fallacies of distributed computing

The network is reliable

Latency is zero

Bandwidth is infinite

The network is secure

Topology doesn't change

There is one administrator

Transport cost is zero

The network is homogeneous

CAP theorem and eventual consistency

Sagas and compensating transactions

Choreography-based sagas

Orchestration-based sagas

Making your system fault tolerant and available

Calculating your system's availability

Building fault-tolerant systems

Leader election

Master-slave replication

Multi-master replication

Queue-based load leveling

Detecting faults

Sidecar design pattern

Heartbeat mechanism

Leaky bucket counter

Minimizing the impact of faults

Retrying the call

Avoiding cascading failures

Circuit breaker

Integrating your system

Pipes and filters pattern

Competing consumers

Transitioning from legacy systems

Anti-corruption layer

Strangler pattern

Achieving performance at scale

CQRS and event sourcing

Command-query responsibility segregation

Command-query separation

Updating caches

Write-through approach

Write-behind approach

Deploying your system

The sidecar pattern

Deploying a service with tracing and a reverse proxy using Envoy

Zero-downtime deployments

Blue-green deployments

Canary releases

External configuration store

Managing your APIs

Further reading

Leveraging C++ Language Features

Leveraging C++ Language Features

Technical requirements

Designing great APIs

Leveraging RAII

Specifying the interfaces of containers in C++

Using pointers in interfaces

Specifying preconditions and postconditions

Leveraging inline namespaces

Leveraging std::optional

Optional function parameters

Optional function return values

Optional class members

Writing declarative code

Showcasing a featured items gallery

Introducing standard ranges

Reducing memory overhead and increasing performance using ranges

Moving computations at compile time

Helping the compiler help you by using const

Leveraging the power of safe types

Constraining template parameters

Writing modular C++

Further reading

Design Patterns and C++

Design Patterns and C++

Technical requirements

Writing idiomatic C++

Automating scope exit actions using RAII guards

Managing copyability and movability

Implementing non-copyable types

Adhering to the rules of three and five

Adhering to the rule of zero

Using hidden friends

Providing exception safety using the copy-and-swap idiom

Writing niebloids

Policy-based design idiom

Curiously recurring template pattern

Knowing when to use dynamic versus static polymorphism

Implementing static polymorphism

Interlude – using type erasure

Creating objects

Using factories

Using factory methods

Using factory functions

Choosing the return type of a factory

Using factory classes

Building with composites and prototypes

Tracking state and visiting objects in C++

Dealing with memory efficiently

Reducing dynamic allocations using SSO/SOO

Saving memory by herding COWs

Leveraging polymorphic allocators

Using memory arenas

Using the monotonic memory resource

Using pool resources

Writing your own memory resource

Ensuring there are no unexpected allocations

Winking out memory

Further reading

Building and Packaging

Building and Packaging

Technical requirements

Getting the most out of compilers

Using multiple compilers

Reducing build times

Using a fast compiler

Rethinking templates

Leveraging tools

Finding potential code issues

Using compiler-centric tools

Abstracting the build process

Introducing CMake

Creating CMake projects

Distinguishing between CMake directory variables

Specifying CMake targets

Specifying the output directories

Using generator expressions

Using external modules

Fetching dependencies

Using find scripts

Writing find scripts

Using the Conan package manager

Preparing Conan profiles

Specifying Conan dependencies

Installing Conan dependencies

Using Conan targets from CMake

Reusing quality code

Packaging using Conan

Creating the conanfile.py script

Testing our Conan package

Adding Conan packaging code to our CMakeLists

Further reading

Section 3: Architectural Quality Attributes

Section 3: Architectural Quality Attributes

Writing Testable Code

Writing Testable Code

Technical requirements

Why do you test code?

The testing pyramid

Non-functional testing

Regression testing

Root cause analysis

The groundwork for further improvement

Introducing testing frameworks

Catch2 examples

CppUnit examples

Doctest examples

Testing compile-time code

Understanding mocks and fakes

Different test doubles

Other uses for test doubles

Writing test doubles

GoogleMock example

Trompeloeil example

Test-driven class design

When tests and class design clash

Defensive programming

The boring refrain – write your tests first

Automating tests for continuous integration/continuous deployment

Testing the infrastructure

Testing with Serverspec

Testing with Testinfra

Testing with Goss

Further reading

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Technical requirements

Understanding CI

Release early, release often

Gating mechanism

Implementing the pipeline with GitLab

Reviewing code changes

Automated gating mechanisms

Code review – the manual gating mechanism

Different approaches to a code review

Using pull requests (merge requests) for a code review

Exploring test-driven automation

Behavior-driven development

Writing tests for CI

Continuous testing

Managing deployment as code

How Ansible fits with the CI/CD pipeline

Using components to create deployment code

Building deployment code

Building a CD pipeline

Continuous deployment and continuous delivery

Building an example CD pipeline

Using immutable infrastructure

What is immutable infrastructure?

The benefits of immutable infrastructure

Building instance images with Packer

Orchestrating the infrastructure with Terraform

Further reading

Security in Code and Deployment

Security in Code and Deployment

Technical requirements

Checking the code security

Security-conscious design

Making interfaces easy to use and hard to misuse

Enabling automatic resource management

Drawbacks of concurrency and how to deal with it

Secure coding, the guidelines, and GSL

Defensive coding, validating everything

The most common vulnerabilities

Checking whether the dependencies are secure

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

Automated scanners

Automated dependency upgrade management

Hardening your code

Security-oriented memory allocator

Automated checks

Compiler warnings

Static analysis

Dynamic analysis

Valgrind and Application Verifier

Process isolation and sandboxing

Hardening your environment

Static versus dynamic linking

Address space layout randomization

Further reading

Performance

Technical requirements

Measuring performance

Performing accurate and meaningful measurements

Leveraging different types of measuring tools

Using microbenchmarks

Setting up Google Benchmark

Writing your first microbenchmark

Passing arbitrary arguments to a microbenchmark

Passing numeric arguments to a microbenchmark

Generating the passed arguments programmatically

Choosing what to microbenchmark and optimize

Creating performance tests using benchmarks

Choosing the type of profiler to use

Preparing the profiler and processing the results

Analyzing the results

Correlation IDs

Helping the compiler generate performant code

Optimizing whole programs

Optimizing based on real-world usage patterns

Writing cache-friendly code

Designing your code with data in mind

Parallelizing computations

Understanding the differences between threads and processes

Using the standard parallel algorithms

Parallelizing computations using OpenMP and MPI

Using coroutines

Distinguishing between cppcoro utilities

Looking under the hood of awaitables and coroutines

Further reading

Section 4: Cloud-Native Design Principles

Section 4: Cloud-Native Design Principles

Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture

Technical requirements

Understanding Service-Oriented Arcitecture

Implementation approaches

Enterprise Service Bus

Benefits and disadvantages of web services

Messaging and streaming

Message brokers

Cloud computing

Benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture

Challenges with SOA

Adopting messaging principles

Low-overhead messaging systems

Brokered messaging systems

Using web services

Tools for debugging web services

XML-based web services

Relationship to SOAP

JSON-based web services

REpresentational State Transfer (REST)

Description languages

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State

Leveraging managed services and cloud providers

Cloud computing as an extension of SOA

Using API calls directly

Using API calls through a CLI tool

Using third-party tools that interact with the Cloud API

Accessing the cloud API

Using the cloud CLI

Using tools that interact with the Cloud API

Cloud-native architecture

Further reading

Designing Microservices

Designing Microservices

Technical requirements

Diving into microservices

The benefits of microservices

Integration with legacy systems

Distributed development

Disadvantages of microservices

Reliance on a mature DevOps approach

Harder to debug

Additional overhead

Design patterns for microservices

Decomposition patterns

Decomposition by business capability

Decomposition by subdomain

Database per service pattern

Deployment strategies

Single service per host

Multiple services per host

Observability patterns

Log aggregation

Application metrics

Distributed tracing

Health check APIs

Building microservices

Outsourcing memory management

Which in-memory cache is better?

Outsourcing storage

Outsourcing computing

Observing microservices

Logging with microservices

Logging in C++ with spdlog

Unified logging layer

Log aggregation

Log visualization

Integrated observability solutions

Connecting microservices

Application programming interfaces (APIs)

Remote procedure calls

Scaling microservices

Scaling a single service per host deployment

Scaling multiple services per host deployment

Further reading

Containers

Technical requirements

Reintroducing containers

Exploring the container types

The rise of microservices

Choosing when to use containers

The benefits of containers

The disadvantages of containers

Building containers

Container images explained

Using Dockerfiles to build an application

Naming and distributing images

Compiled applications and containers

Targeting multiple architectures with manifests

Alternative ways to build application containers

Integrating containers with CMake

Configuring the Dockerfile with CMake

Integrating containers with CMake

Testing and integrating containers

Runtime libraries inside containers

Alternative container runtimes

Understanding container orchestration

Self-hosted solutions

Managed services

Azure Service Fabric

Further reading

Cloud-Native Design

Cloud-Native Design

Technical requirements

Understanding cloud-native

Cloud-Native Computing Foundation

Cloud as an operating system

Load balancing and service discovery

Reverse proxies

Service Discovery

Using Kubernetes to orchestrate cloud-native workloads

Kubernetes structure

Possible approaches to deploying Kubernetes

Understanding the Kubernetes concepts

Declarative approach

Kubernetes networking

Container-to-container communication

Pod-to-pod communication

Pod-to-service communication

External-to-internal communication

When is using Kubernetes a good idea?

Observability in distributed systems

How tracing differs from logging

Choosing a tracing solution

Jaeger and OpenTracing

Instrumenting an application with OpenTracing

Connecting services with a service mesh

Introducing a service mesh

Service mesh solutions

Consul service mesh

The principles of GitOps

Declarative description

The system's state versioned in Git

Integrated with established components

Configuration drift prevention

The benefits of GitOps

Increased productivity

Better developer experience

Higher stability and reliability

Improved security

Further reading

Assessments

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Appendix A

Designing data storage

Which NoSQL technology should I use?

Serverless architecture

Communication and culture

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Chapter 3

What are quality attributes?
- Traits, or qualities, that a system may have. Often called "ilities," as many of them have this postfix in their names, for instance, portability.
What sources should you use when gathering requirements?
- The context of your system, existing documentation, and the system's stakeholders.
How should you be able to tell whether a requirement is architecturally significant?
- Architecturally significant requirements (ASRs) often require a separate software component, impact a large part of the system, are hard to achieve, and/or force you to make trade-offs.
How should you document graphically the functional requirements various parties may have regarding your system?
- Prepare a use case diagram.
When is development view documentation useful?
- In cases where you're developing a large system with many modules and need to communicate global constraints and common design choices to all the software teams.
How should...