Deployment view

A deployment view is an architecture view that describes the technical infrastructure a system runs on, and the mapping of its software elements onto that infrastructure. It covers the hardware a system needs, such as processing nodes, network interconnections, and disk storage; the technical requirements for each node; and which software element runs where.

Where the building block view shows how a system is structured in source code, and the runtime view shows how its building blocks collaborate at runtime, the deployment view answers a different question. On what physical or virtual machines does any of this actually execute? This matters most for systems with non-trivial infrastructure — multiple environments, distributed nodes, or hardware constraints — and matters far less for a system that just runs as a single process on a single machine.

References

• Rozanski, N, and Woods, E (2011). Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives. Addison-Wesley.