Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Architecture Documentation”
Architecture Decision Log
The ordered, immutable collection of a system's decision records, read as a history rather than as a specification.
Architecture Decision Record
A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
C4 Model
A set of four nested diagram levels — context, container, component, code — that keeps each diagram at one consistent level of abstraction.
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Architecture Principle
A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Review Board
A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
Architecture Style
A named, coarse-grained way of organising a whole system, as distinct from a pattern that solves one recurring problem inside it.
Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method
A structured evaluation that scores an architecture against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and identifies the points where those attributes conflict.
Cell-Based Architecture
Partitioning a service into complete, independent copies of itself, each serving a subset of customers, so a failure is bounded to one cell.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with a strict dependency rule — source code dependencies point only inwards, towards higher-level policy.
Event-Driven Architecture
A style in which components communicate by emitting and reacting to facts about what happened, rather than by calling each other.
Evolutionary Architecture
Designing for guided, incremental change rather than trying to get the structure right once, up front.
Hexagonal Architecture
Putting the domain at the centre and letting everything external — UI, database, queues — attach through ports implemented by replaceable adapters.
Layered Architecture
Organising code into horizontal layers — presentation, application, domain, data — where each layer may only call the one beneath it.
Netflix's Recommendation Architecture
Netflix splits personalisation into offline, nearline and online layers so that expensive computation happens ahead of time and the request path stays fast.
When is an architectural decision worth an ADR, and what makes an ADR useful two years later?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you document decisions as a habit, and whether you know that most documentation fails because it records the wrong thing
Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the binding constraint. For most products it is not traffic. What Instagram actually did Their 2011 pos
Architecture Documentation
What to write down, at what altitude, and what nobody will ever read.
API Documentation
OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.
Documentation Practice
Keeping documents close to the code and honest about staleness.
AI-Era Architecture
General material on architecting systems that include models.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Architecture Communication
General material on communicating architecture.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Architecture Decision Records
One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.
Architecture Decision-Making
General material on making and recording architectural decisions.
Architecture Diagrams
Choosing an audience and refusing to mix levels of abstraction.
Architecture Fundamentals
General material on what solution architecture is and what an architect is accountable for.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Patterns
General material on architectural patterns and their trade-offs.
Architecture Principles
Durable agreed rules that rule options out, stated with rationale and implications.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Architecture Reviews
Reviewing early enough to influence rather than to veto.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Architecture Roles
Solution, enterprise, domain and platform architecture, and where each is accountable.
Architecture Styles
System-level organising shapes, and how they differ from problem-level patterns.
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Cell-Based Architecture
Complete isolated copies each serving a subset of customers.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with dependencies pointing only inwards.
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Data Architecture
General material on structuring, storing and governing data.
Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
Ethics in Architecture
Privacy, accessibility, sustainability and the consequences of a design.
Event-Driven Architecture
Publishing facts, and trading comprehensibility for decoupling.
Evolutionary Architecture
Designing for guided incremental change rather than for correctness on day one.
Hexagonal Architecture
Ports defined by the domain, adapters supplied by infrastructure.
LLM Application Architecture
The shape of a production system with a model in the request path.
Layered Architecture
The default shape, its clarity, and where a technical partition fails.
Multi-Region Architecture
Surviving a region, and the data consistency price of doing so.
AI-Era Architecture
AI workloads meeting security, data, networking, reliability and cost.
API & Integration Architecture
Contracts between systems, and the compatibility discipline that keeps them working.
Architecture Communication
Explain the same architecture to a CEO, an engineering manager and an engineer.
Architecture Decision-Making
Where senior engineer becomes architect: evaluate, choose, write it down.
Architecture Fundamentals
What architecture actually is: drivers, constraints, trade-offs and the principles behind them.
Architecture Patterns
Patterns as tools for recurring problems, with forces and consequences.
Business Architecture
Connecting technology decisions to the outcomes that fund them.
Cloud Architecture
Cloud as a set of architectural capabilities, not a catalogue of service names.
Cost Architecture & FinOps
Architecture is also economics; exceptional architects can price their designs.
Data Architecture
Where state lives, how it is modelled, replicated, partitioned and governed.
Enterprise Architecture
Portfolio-level architecture: standards, governance and the estate as a whole.