REST Architecture, or Representational State Transfer, is a set of principles for designing networked applications. It relies on stateless communication and standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to manage resources, making it easy to build scalable and maintainable web services. In REST, resources are identified by URIs and can be represented in various formats, such as JSON or XML. This architecture promotes a clear separation between client and server, allowing for independent development and deployment, which enhances flexibility and performance in web applications.