Internal Developer Platform  ·  View 02 of 21  ·  Context and scope

High-Level Architecture

The seven stages between an engineer's intent and a running, attributed workload.

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Ask Developer Portal Backstage Platform CLI Declare Scaffolder golden paths Team Repository intent · source of truth Build Shared Pipeline GitHub Actions Signed Artefact ACR · attested Check Advisory Policy in the pull request Admission Policy binding · unbypassed Reconcile Workload Reconciler Argo CD Infra Reconciler Terraform runners Run Shared AKS Runtime namespace per component Managed Resources SQL · bus · DNS Observe Software Catalog projection Adoption and DORA platform's scoreboard Internal Developer Platform — High-Level Architecture Application we own External / third party Data store Decision point Security / platform The portal writes intent into the team's repository and stops. Everything downstream reconciles towards that declaration. v 1.0 · owner Platform Architecture · date 2026-09

Decisions

  • The surfaces write intent and stop. No surface calls Azure Resource Manager directly, which is what makes a partial failure resumable rather than a state-reconstruction exercise (ADR-02).
  • Checking appears twice and deliberately: advisory in the pull request, binding at admission, both from one policy source (ADR-05, ADR-06).
  • The catalog sits at the end of the chain, not the start, because it is a projection of what was declared and what is running (ADR-09).

Reads as

  • Left to right is the engineer's own sequence, not a layering. Nothing in the chain is optional except the paved road itself.
  • An off-road component joins at the Check stage and is subject to everything from there rightwards.

Omitted

  • The feedback loop from Observe back to Declare — it is the update pull request and the drift report, drawn in views 15 and 19.
  • Rollback, which runs outside this chain by design so that a broken pipeline cannot block recovery (view 17).
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Microsoft Azure · Platform Architecture · 2026-09 · 21 views · 16 architecture decision records02-high-level-architecture