11/04/2026
Architecture guides how infrastructure is selected and arranged; infrastructure supplies the resources that make the design operational.
Example: an online store
For a hypothetical online store:
Architecture decisions might include separating checkout from the product catalog, deciding which components can access customer data, and arranging redundant components so a failure doesn’t take down the whole store.
Infrastructure would include the actual computing instances, database services, storage, and networking that run those components.
Two stores could use the same cloud provider and the same types of resources but have very different architectures because they connect and organize those resources differently.