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:
“We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)