A system architecture or systems architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and more views of a system.
An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures of the system, which comprise system components, the externally visible properties of those components, the relationships (e.g. the behavior) between them, and provides a plan from which products can be procured, and systems developed, that will work together to implement the overall system. More recently, there have been efforts to formalize languages to describe system architecture, collectively these are called architecture description languages (ADLs).
Famous quotes containing the words systems and/or architecture:
“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)