Architecture Patterns vs. Architectural Styles

People often ask about the difference between a pattern and a style. Michael Keeling and I recorded a discussion about architectural styles (like pipe and filter, client server) compared to architectural patterns. Not to spoil the surprise, but we ended up mostly agreeing that it’s good to think of the style as providing the vocabulary of elements (clients, servers, …) and the patterns as providing conventional arrangements (ie patterns) of those elements.