Architecture Decision-Making
Where senior engineer becomes architect: evaluate, choose, write it down.
20 topics in this area.
Each topic is the unit content is filed against. Topics with nothing in them yet are shown too — they are the honest edge of the curriculum rather than a gap being hidden.
Architecture Decision-Making
General material on making and recording architectural decisions.
Architecture Decision Records
One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.
No content yetReversibility
One-way and two-way doors, and buying optionality deliberately.
No content yetBuild vs Buy
Differentiation, five-year TCO, and the exit cost of each option.
No content yetMonolith vs Microservices
A team-topology decision far more often than a technology one.
No content yetSQL vs NoSQL
Decided by access patterns and query flexibility, not by data volume.
No content yetSync vs Async
Whether the caller's outcome depends on the callee's response.
No content yetStrong vs Eventual Consistency
A per-operation decision, resolved by what a stale read would cost.
No content yetManaged vs Self-Managed
Trading control and unit cost against operational attention.
No content yetServerless vs Containers
Spiky and event-driven versus sustained throughput.
No content yetSingle vs Multi-Region
Driven by RTO, RPO and residency rather than by ambition.
No content yetCentralised vs Distributed
Shared platform leverage against team autonomy.
No content yetPerformance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
No content yetReliability vs Complexity
Mechanisms that add availability and add failure modes.
No content yetSecurity vs Usability
Varying control by the value of the action rather than uniformly.
No content yetDelivery vs Maintainability
Fast in the cheap places, careful in the expensive ones.
No content yetDeciding Under Uncertainty
Bounding the downside and buying information cheaply.
No content yetTrade-off Analysis Methods
ATAM, scenarios, and naming the points where qualities conflict.
No content yetTechnology Selection
Evaluating options against drivers rather than against enthusiasm.
No content yetDecision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.
No content yet