Maintained by Reindeer Technology Pte. Ltd. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
ADL is an open, provider-agnostic format for describing a software system's architecture as data.
An ADL document states what a system is made of, how the pieces connect, and — crucially — what the system is for: the use cases it serves, the business meaning behind each part, and the impact a change would have. That last part is what source code and infrastructure templates cannot tell you, and what is usually lost when the people who built the system move on.
Because an architecture is plain, schema-validated data rather than a diagram file, it can be read by both people and programs: rendered as diagrams, diffed across versions, queried for impact analysis, or handed to an AI assistant as grounding for questions like "if I change this database, who is affected?"
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
ja/, en/ |
The canonical JSON Schema for ADL, in Japanese and English |
index.html, index_ja.html |
The specification, rendered for reading — published at docs.reindeer.tech (日本語) |
resources/ |
Stylesheets and scripts used by the rendered specification |
LICENSE |
Apache License, Version 2.0 |
The schema files are the single source of truth. Everything else in this repository, and every copy of the schema elsewhere, is derived from them.
The schema is a standard JSON Schema document, so any JSON Schema validator can check an ADL file. Nothing in the format is tied to a particular vendor, cloud, or tool.
Copyright 2019-2026 Reindeer Technology Pte. Ltd. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.