What is Software Architecture?
The high-level structure of a software system: the components, how they communicate, what responsibilities each owns, and the principles that guide decisions about where things go. Architecture is not a document written once; it is an ongoing set of decisions that shape a system's ability to evolve, scale, and be maintained by a team over time.
My perspective
In practice
The most important architectural decisions are rarely about frameworks or languages; they are about where to draw boundaries. Boundaries between services, between data ownership, between what changes frequently and what needs to stay stable. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) make those choices visible and reversible. In AI systems, architecture takes on an additional dimension: where does the model live relative to the data, the user, and the business logic? Getting that topology right early avoids painful rewrites later.