Application Architecture

What is Application Architecture all about? Firstly, the business drivers of an application should be identified and architectural needs of the application should be derived from that. Requirements for an application should be completely and unambiguously specified. For example, requirements like “Architecture should be robust” have no meaning unless it is quantified as “Architecture should be able to provide 24×7 availability support with maximum system downtime of 5 min”. Then there are also the Technical requirements, for example scaling up, fail-over capability and many others. Database design requirements are also part of an application’s architecture.