Skip to content
CDACDA Developer Portal

What is CDA?

Continuous-Driven Architecture (CDA) is an open-source ecosystem of libraries and developer tooling built around one idea:

Architecture that software can understand.

Architecture models today live inside desktop editors. They are rich, faithful design intent — but they are largely opaque to software: closed formats, human-centric workflows, no CI, no diffs, no automation.

CDA treats architecture as structured data: versioned like source code, validated in pipelines, consumable by tools. The first step in that direction is reading the models architects actually produce — natively, faithfully, without lossy reinterpretation — and exposing them through small, typed APIs.

What CDA is not

Section titled “What CDA is not”
  • Not a new architecture methodology — existing frameworks and tools (such as Archi and ArchiMate®) remain the source of truth for modeling.
  • Not a replacement for modeling tools — CDA consumes their output.
  • Not a single monolithic platform — a suite of independent packages.

The core principle

Section titled “The core principle”

Faithfulness over convenience. A model means what the modeling tool stored, not what a consumer might find convenient. Every CDA package preserves native semantics and documents boundaries honestly — including what it does not do.

Where it fits

Section titled “Where it fits”
architects model (Archi, ArchiMate®)
        │
        ▼
native model files (.archimate, …)
        │
        ▼
CDA libraries (typed, faithful parsing)
        │
        ▼
CI pipelines · governance · tooling · GitOps

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”