Technology Selection
Evaluating options against drivers rather than against enthusiasm.
5 to work through
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intermediate
A team is selecting a technology for a new component. What should the evaluation include beyond technical fit?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A team must choose between four candidate technologies. What method produces a defensible decision, and what makes most technology comparisons useless?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A team proposes Kafka for a workload of a few thousand messages per day. When is Kafka over-engineering, what is the alternative, and when does the answer change?
3 min answer -
advanced
How would you evaluate a new database for a critical workload, and what would make you reject it despite good benchmarks?
2 min answer -
advanced
Three teams have independently chosen three different message brokers. Design the selection and governance process going forward.
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Technology Evaluation Criteria
A standing set of dimensions for assessing a candidate technology, ensuring that operability and longevity are weighed alongside capability.
practiceTechnology Selection
Choosing a technology on the basis of fit, operability and organisational capacity — with a strong prior toward what you already run well.
case-studyUber: Choosing a Database for Write Amplification
Uber publicly documented moving from Postgres to MySQL for their workload, and the reasoning is a useful lesson in evaluating a datastore against you…
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Decision-Making
General material on making and recording architectural decisions.
Architecture Decision Records
One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.
Reversibility
One-way and two-way doors, and buying optionality deliberately.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation, five-year TCO, and the exit cost of each option.
Monolith vs Microservices
A team-topology decision far more often than a technology one.
SQL vs NoSQL
Decided by access patterns and query flexibility, not by data volume.
Sync vs Async
Whether the caller's outcome depends on the callee's response.
Strong vs Eventual Consistency
A per-operation decision, resolved by what a stale read would cost.
Managed vs Self-Managed
Trading control and unit cost against operational attention.
Serverless vs Containers
Spiky and event-driven versus sustained throughput.
Single vs Multi-Region
Driven by RTO, RPO and residency rather than by ambition.
Centralised vs Distributed
Shared platform leverage against team autonomy.
Performance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
Reliability vs Complexity
Mechanisms that add availability and add failure modes.
Security vs Usability
Varying control by the value of the action rather than uniformly.
Delivery vs Maintainability
Fast in the cheap places, careful in the expensive ones.
Deciding Under Uncertainty
Bounding the downside and buying information cheaply.
Trade-off Analysis Methods
ATAM, scenarios, and naming the points where qualities conflict.
Decision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.