Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Architecture Review Boards”
Architecture Review Board
A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
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.
Well-Architected Review
A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Human in the Loop
Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
OWASP Top Ten
A periodically updated consensus list of the most critical web application security risks, useful as a design-review checklist.
Presenting to Engineers
Presenting a design at the level of mechanism, including the alternatives rejected and the parts you are still unsure about.
Technical Proposal
A written argument for a course of action, circulated for review before the work starts, structured so that disagreement surfaces early and cheaply.
Threat Modelling
A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
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.
Architecture Principle
A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Style
A named, coarse-grained way of organising a whole system, as distinct from a pattern that solves one recurring problem inside it.
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.
In a design review, a respected senior engineer proposes an approach you believe is wrong. The room defers to them. How do you handle it?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can be effective without authority, which is most of the architect's job. It is also testing whether you assume you
You are reviewing a design for an internal tool with 200 users. It proposes Kubernetes, microservices, Kafka, a service mesh and CQRS. How do you handle the review?
What the interviewer is testing Judgement, and whether you can push back without alienating a team. Anyone can spot over engineering; the question is what you d
Your services currently trust anything inside the VPC. A security review says move to zero trust. What changes, and what will it cost you?
What the interviewer is testing Whether "zero trust" is a concrete set of changes to you, or a slogan. What actually changes Workload identity. Every service ge
A team shows you a design with eight services. Without knowing the domain, what questions tell you whether the boundaries are right?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can evaluate a structure from its properties rather than needing to be a domain expert in every system you review. T
A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?
What the interviewer is testing Whether cost is part of your architecture review or an afterthought handled by finance later, and whether you know the specific
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Code Review
Where architectural rules are enforced by people rather than by tools.
Decision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
Identity & Access Management
Workload identity, roles, permission boundaries and usage-based review.
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 Documentation
What to write down, at what altitude, and what nobody will ever read.
Architecture Fundamentals
General material on what solution architecture is and what an architect is accountable for.
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 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.
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.