Integration points
Learn about the butterfly and spider patterns of a project with their pros and cons, also how integration points can be a system's biggest killer.
The Butterfly pattern
We haven’t seen a straight-up “website” project since about 1996. Everything is an integration project with some combination of HTML veneer, front-end app, API, mobile app, or all of the above. The context diagram for these projects will fall into one of two patterns: the butterfly or the spider. A butterfly has a central system with several feeds and connections fanning into it on one side and out of it on the other side, as shown in the figure that follows.
Some people would call this a monolith, but that has negative connotations. It might be a nicely factored system that just has a lot of responsibility.
The spider web pattern
The other style is the spider web, with many boxes and dependencies. If we’ve been diligent (and maybe a bit lucky), the ...