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126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
39 results for “C4 Model”
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.
Model Context Protocol
An open protocol that standardises how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources and prompts.
Model Router
Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
Read Model
A data structure shaped for a specific query rather than for the domain, maintained separately from the write model.
Shared Responsibility Model
The division of duties between provider and customer, which shifts with the service model and is routinely misunderstood in the customer's disfavour.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective
The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
AI Gateway
A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Anti-Corruption Layer
A translation layer that converts a legacy or external system's model into your own, so its concepts do not leak into your domain.
CQRS
Separating the model used to change state from the model used to read it, so each can be optimised independently.
Causal Consistency
A model guaranteeing that operations which causally depend on one another are seen in the same order everywhere, while concurrent operations may be seen in any order.
Context Window
The maximum number of tokens a model can attend to in one request, holding the system prompt, history, retrieved context, tools and the answer.
Guardrail
A deterministic check applied to a model's input or output, enforcing rules that cannot be left to the model itself.
Materialized View
A precomputed, stored result of a query, refreshed on a schedule or from a change stream, read instead of recomputing.
Projection
The process that consumes changes from the write side and maintains a read model, and the component where most CQRS bugs live.
Prompt Injection
An attack in which text from an untrusted source is interpreted by the model as instructions rather than as data.
Prompt Registry
A versioned store of production prompts with their model bindings, parameters and evaluation results, so a prompt change is a reviewable, traceable, reversible deployment.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieving relevant documents at query time and putting them in the model's context, so answers are grounded in your data rather than in training data.
Semantic Cache
Caching model responses keyed by the meaning of the request rather than by its exact text, so near-duplicate questions are served without a model call.
Serverless
A model where the provider allocates and scales compute per request, and you are billed for execution rather than for provisioned capacity.
Star Schema
A dimensional model with one central fact table of measurements surrounded by denormalised dimension tables describing them.
Tool Calling
Giving a model a set of typed function definitions it can request to invoke, with the application executing the call and returning the result.
Zero Trust
A security model that grants no implicit trust from network position, and authenticates and authorises every request individually.
A document collaboration product needs sharing with individuals, teams, and inherited folder permissions. Which authorization model?
The requirement is relationship shaped The questions this product must answer are: is this user a member of a team that has access to a folder that contains thi
Run a threat model on a new payment integration: our service calls a third-party payment provider and receives webhooks. Where are the interesting threats?
Draw the boundaries first Three trust boundaries, and nearly every interesting threat lives on one of them: 1. User → our service (untrusted input, authenticate
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
A regulator asks whether customer data is encrypted. The team says yes, disks are encrypted. Is that a sufficient answer?
What disk encryption actually protects against Someone obtaining the physical medium or a raw storage snapshot. In a cloud context that means a provider employe
A team proposes CQRS for a CRUD admin panel because reads are slow. Is that the right call?
Why not CQRS here "Reads are slow" is a symptom with many causes, and CQRS addresses only one of them: the read and write models having genuinely different opti
C4 Model
Context, container, component and code as four separate diagrams.
Model Selection
Capability, latency, cost and the evaluation that decides between them.
Anti-Corruption Layer
Translating a foreign model at the boundary so it does not leak in.
Bounded Contexts
Where one model ends and another begins, and why forcing one fails.
CQRS
Separating the write model from the read models that serve queries.
Containers
Images, registries, immutability and the deployment model they enable.
Embeddings
Dense representations, model coupling and the migration they imply.
LLM Application Architecture
The shape of a production system with a model in the request path.
Legacy Integration
Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.
Reranking
Cross-encoders improving precision more than a bigger embedding model.
WebSockets & Realtime
Persistent bidirectional connections and the capacity model they impose.