By the early stages of its Solution Architecture (SA) design and modeling, FAME has adopted the C4 model for effectively covering its design process, since its main goal was to have a clear vision of what kind of system is needed to be built (both at technical and at business level), contributing to the evolution of the system and the creation of a solid roadmap. By using the C4, this goal was achieved in an agile manner, enhancing the project as a whole. At the same time, this model allowed the FAME consortium to share the project’s architectural knowledge with the community in a simplified manner, making clear its goal and the overall added value of the final system.
To this context, FAME has followed all the C4 existing guidelines and principles, applying in its diagrams (Context, Container, Component) FAME customized C4 notations. In short, the Context diagram illustrates the FAME’s target system (i.e., FAME Federated Data Marketplace) along with the diverse groups of stakeholders that it can interact with (i.e., Data Provider, Data Consumer, FAME Administrator), as well as the interacting external systems, referring to any external Data Marketplace or Data Space that intends to share its data assets with the FAME Federated Data Marketplace. As for the Container diagram, it depicts a zoomed-in view of the FAME Federated Data Marketplace, showing the containers executed inside its system. To better reflect and group the overall system’s functionalities and inner containers, the latter have been grouped into the five (5) layers of Dashboard, Open APIs, Federation Manager, Transactional Operations, and Energy Efficient Analytics Services. In sequel, twenty-two (22) diverse Component diagrams were drafted to illustrate the zoomed-in view of each container of FAME, depicting all the components making up each separate container, along with their tasks and their implementation detail. As a final note, the Code diagram was skipped, since the underlying components were covered from the provided level of detail of the individual Component diagrams.
Having analysed the C4-oriented FAME SA within the FAME team members, presenting it at the same time in different events and external stakeholders’ communities (both business and academic), it was revealed that having exploited the C4 model facilitated all the involved parties to better follow and interpret the system’s scope and functionalities, more efficiently providing their feedback.
Further information of the C4-oriented FAME SA can be located in Zenodo, accessible here.
Author(s): Argyro Mavrogiorgou
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