Question

Find a commonly accepted definition of system architecture and discuss what it has in common with software architecture. Do the same for enterprise architecture.

Answer 1

System Architecture is generally a conceptual model which defines the behavior of structure

1. Behavior of the system.

2. Structure of the system.

3. View of the system.

Software Architecture deals with technical and operational requirements of the application or Software. sometimes it optimizes security, performance, and manageability.

Although the fact that they can be described differently, software and systems are really need to be planned together. during the small scale you can safely disambiguate the two, but as load the load of your application or software( i.e. number of user, number of database, apis) increases you will need to start making software and system architecture decisions in conjunction to work towards a particular strategy of scaling.

In a word you can describe like software architecture is basically a type of system architecture.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) consists the whole organization and may be beyond. It includes Information Architecture, Business Architecture,Technology Architecture and Application Architecture. It is strategic and it says "What" needs to be done .

System Architecture (SA) where as says about one or more systems of the organization. SA is operational and thus it is "How" it needs to be done.

In other words, SA is under Application Architecture and thus SA can be said as subset of EA. Like the same thing when it consists a system, then system architecture and when it's about overall enterprise, it's enterprise architecture.