Architecture Foundations
The foundational principles, frameworks, and mental models every architect needs. These articles establish the language and standards that unify design decisions across teams and systems.
Start here if you're new
Architecture Principles and Quality Attributes are the best starting points. They define the "why" behind most patterns in this library.
Architecture Principles
Core rules — simplicity, loose coupling, high cohesion, and explicit boundaries — that should hold across every system and team.
Quality Attributes & NFRs
Availability, scalability, latency, security, maintainability, portability, and cost. The lens through which every design trade-off is evaluated.
Trade-off Analysis
Structured approaches to comparing competing architectural options when improving one dimension harms another.
Architecture Decision Records (ADR)
Lightweight records of architectural decisions, context, and consequences for traceability and team alignment.
Reference Architectures
Reusable architecture blueprints for common solution shapes that teams can adapt rather than design from scratch.
Bounded Contexts
Defining clear subsystem boundaries and responsibilities when multiple teams or domains interact.
Domain Modeling
Identifying entities, value objects, aggregates, and invariants when business logic is complex or domain-heavy.
CAP Theorem
The fundamental constraint that distributed systems can guarantee only two of Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance.
PACELC Theorem
An extension of CAP that also considers the latency vs consistency trade-off during normal operation (not just during partitions).
Eventual Consistency
The consistency model where replicas eventually converge to the same value, enabling higher availability and performance.
Idempotency
Ensuring repeated operations produce the same result — critical for safe retries, message delivery, and external callbacks.
Backward Compatibility
Strategies for evolving shared interfaces safely while preserving existing consumers.