Search the practice set
275 questions, 991 terms and 600 topics in 30 areas.
60 results for “Push & Background Work”
Best Effort Delivery
The guarantee push notification services actually offer — which is none — and the design consequences of building on a channel that may silently drop.
Operational Data Push
Sending modelled analytical data back into operational tools, which turns a warehouse table into a production dependency with none of the guarantees.
Admission Control
Deciding at the edge whether to accept a request at all, based on current capacity, before any work is done on it.
Ambiguity Tolerance
The capacity to make progress on a problem before it is fully specified, which is the normal condition of architectural work.
Amdahl's Law
The limit on speedup from optimising or parallelising part of a system, set by the proportion of work that remains unchanged.
Backpressure
A mechanism by which a component under load tells its callers to slow down, rather than accepting work it cannot complete.
Backward Compatibility
The property that a new version of a producer continues to work with clients written against the old version.
Blue-Green Database Schema
The constraint that makes fast rollback actually work — both application versions must be able to run against one schema at the same time.
CI/CD
Merging work continuously into a shared trunk with automated verification, and keeping every commit in a state that could be released.
Checkpoint Interval
How often a stateful processor persists its state and offsets, which trades steady-state overhead against how much work is redone after a failure.
Cognitive Load
The total amount a team must hold in its head to work effectively, and a real constraint on how many services or domains one team can own.
Commercial Literacy
Sufficient understanding of how the business makes money and what it is measured on to translate technical work into terms that compete for funding.
Competing Consumers
Multiple identical consumers reading from one queue, so throughput scales with consumer count and work is distributed automatically.
Cost of Delay
What it costs the business per unit of time that a piece of work is not delivered, which is the input that makes prioritisation an economic decision.
Decommissioning Discipline
The work of actually switching a legacy system off, which is where migration savings are realised and which is routinely left undone.
Definition of Done
The agreed, explicit conditions under which work is finished, which functions as a quality gate only when it is automated and non-negotiable.
Enterprise Integration Patterns
A catalogue of named, composable messaging patterns — router, translator, aggregator, splitter, filter, dead letter channel — that gives integration work a shared vocabulary.
Feature Criticality Tiering
Classifying product functionality by whether it must work, should work, or can be dropped, so degradation decisions are made in advance by the business.
Feature Flag
A runtime switch that decouples deploying code from releasing behaviour, so unfinished or risky work can ship dark.
Filter Composability
The property that makes a pipeline style work — each stage transforms input to output with no shared state, so stages can be reordered, reused and scaled independently.
Flow Efficiency
The proportion of total elapsed time in which work is actively being progressed rather than waiting, typically far lower than anyone expects.
Friction Budget
The limited amount of security friction users will absorb before they work around it, making usability a security property rather than its opponent.
Load Shedding
Deliberately rejecting a portion of incoming work during overload so that the remainder can be served correctly.
Optimistic Concurrency Control
Allowing concurrent work without locks and detecting conflict at write time by checking that the underlying version has not changed.
Parallelism and Concurrency
The distinction between structuring work so it can make progress independently and actually executing work simultaneously on multiple cores.
Pipeline Fan-Out
Splitting independent verification work to run in parallel, bounded by what genuinely has no ordering dependency on anything else.
Priority Queueing
Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Process Model
A representation of how work actually flows through an organisation, distinguished from a capability by describing sequence, actors and handoffs.
Queue Time Attribution
Splitting elapsed lead time into work and waiting, and naming which queue each wait sat in.
Review Readiness Criteria
A stated bar a design must meet before review, so the session is spent on judgement rather than on discovering that the work is not ready.
Saturation Point
The load level beyond which additional demand produces queueing and latency growth rather than additional completed work.
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.
Stale While Revalidate
Serving cached data immediately while fetching a fresh copy in the background, which makes an interface feel instant at the cost of a brief inconsistency.
Team Interaction Mode
The defined way two teams work together — collaborating, consuming a service, or facilitating — chosen deliberately and expected to change over time.
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.
Temporal Coupling
A dependency in which one component requires another to be available at the same moment, so the availability of both is required for either to work.
Throughput
The rate of work a system completes per unit of time — and a quantity that trades against latency rather than tracking it.
Toil
Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with service growth and produces no lasting improvement.
Two-Way Door
A decision that can be undone cheaply, and which therefore warrants a fast decision by the people closest to the work rather than extensive analysis.
WebSocket
A protocol that upgrades an HTTP connection into a persistent, full-duplex channel so the server can push to the client without polling.
Webhook
An HTTP callback from a provider to a consumer-supplied URL when an event occurs, replacing polling with push.
A team proposes exposing their service's database change stream via CDC so other teams can consume it, avoiding the work of building an event API. What is your assessment?
Name what is actually being proposed The proposal is to publish the service's internal schema as its integration contract. CDC does not emit domain events; it e
A team proposes moving personalisation to edge functions to cut latency. When does that work and when does it backfire?
The principle that decides it The edge is near the user and far from your data. Edge compute pays off for work that needs the request but not your state . The m
Partner integrations take four months from contract signature to production traffic. Engineering says the work is three days. Where does the time go and how do you cut it?
Map the elapsed time honestly The engineering estimate is correct and irrelevant. The four months are: Legal and contractual review. Security questionnaires and
You are designing a field-service application for engineers who work in basements and rural sites with no reliable connectivity. What is the architecture, and what are the decisions that will bite later?
The shape: local first, with the server as an eventual replica Connectivity is an optimisation, not a precondition. The application writes to a local store, ren
You need funding for eighteen months of platform work with no customer-visible features. How do you build the case?
Do not lead with the technology "We need to modernise the platform" is a request for trust. Lead with a number the business already recognises as a problem. Fin
Push & Background Work
Delivery that is best-effort, and an operating system that will kill your process.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.
Estimation
Sizing work and cost honestly, with the uncertainty stated.
Flow Metrics
Work in progress, flow time and flow efficiency — where a change waits rather than moves.
Load Shedding
Rejecting some work deliberately so the rest can be served correctly.
Meta-Skills
General material on how architects think and work.
Mobile App Architecture
Layering, navigation, background execution, and the platform rules you do not set.
Publish/Subscribe
Broadcast to every subscriber, as distinct from work distribution.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Throughput
Work completed per unit time, and why it trades against latency.
Trunk-Based Development
Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.
Webhooks
Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.