Visualising software architecture with the C4 model
summary
Most architecture diagrams are “boxes and lines” chaos, so C4 prescribes four concrete abstraction levels — System, Container, Component, Code — and shows how an internet‑banking example maps to them: Angular SPA and MAUI mobile UIs, a Java Spring MVC API monolith, Oracle schema, Exchange for email, and a mainframe integration behind a DMZ. Level‑4 uses UML; containers map to Docker/AWS deployments. Top two levels are often sufficient; component extraction and automatic generation are possible but hard because of the model–code gap.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:10Problem with software diagrams
- 9:21Why UML isn't used
- 10:47Model-code gap explained
- 13:52C4 model introduction
- 18:27C4 abstractions defined
- 19:09Diagrams as maps
- 21:40When to use C4 levels
- 25:11Context diagram example
- 27:15Container diagram example
- 31:48Component diagram example
- 33:13Code diagram and UML
- 34:41C4 model flexibility
- 35:23Other C4 diagram types
- 37:28Deployment diagrams
- 39:38Message-driven architectures
- 42:48Microservices with C4
- 47:24Summary and book code
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