What are common system design patterns for software architecture?

1 Layered pattern

The layered pattern is one of the simplest and most widely used system design patterns. It organizes the system into layers of abstraction, where each layer provides a specific functionality and communicates only with the adjacent layers. For example, a typical web application may have a presentation layer, a business logic layer, a data access layer, and a database layer. The layered pattern helps to separate concerns, promote modularity, and facilitate testing and maintenance.

3 Event-driven pattern

The event-driven pattern is a system design pattern that relies on the production and consumption of events to trigger actions and reactions in the system. An event is a significant change in the state or condition of the system or its components, such as a user input, a sensor reading, or a message arrival. The event-driven pattern consists of three main roles: event producers, event consumers, and event brokers. The event producers generate and publish events to the event brokers, which are responsible for routing and delivering the events to the appropriate event consumers, which perform the corresponding tasks or responses. The event-driven pattern enables high responsiveness, scalability, and decoupling, but also requires careful design of the event schema, format, and semantics.

4 Peer-to-peer pattern

The peer-to-peer pattern is a system design pattern that distributes the workload and data among multiple nodes or peers that are equal and autonomous. There is no central server or authority that controls or coordinates the system. Instead, the peers communicate and cooperate with each other directly or through intermediate nodes. The peer-to-peer pattern can support various applications, such as file sharing, content delivery, distributed computing, or blockchain. The peer-to-peer pattern offers high scalability, fault tolerance, and resilience, but also poses challenges such as security, consistency, and performance.

5 Model-view-controller pattern

The model-view-controller pattern is a system design pattern that separates the system into three components: model, view, and controller. The model represents the data and the business logic of the system. The view displays the data and the user interface of the system. The controller handles the user input and the interaction between the model and the view. The model-view-controller pattern helps to achieve low coupling, high cohesion, and easy reuse of the components. It also facilitates the development and testing of the system by allowing different components to be modified or replaced independently.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?