Fundamentals
Timeless architecture concept notes — hand-curated, not sourced from news. Bucketed by pillar, not flat — see Architecture/system_prompt for the pillar taxonomy and note template.
Security
- Defense in Depth
- Zero Trust Architecture
- Encryption: At Rest, In Transit, and In Use
- Threat Modeling with STRIDE
- Mutual TLS (mTLS)
- OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect
- Secrets Management and Rotation
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Management
- Least Privilege and IAM Policy Design
Resilience
- Circuit Breaker Pattern
- Bulkhead Pattern
- Disaster Recovery Strategies
- Chaos Engineering
- Idempotency Keys
- Retry Strategies: Backoff, Jitter, and Retry Storms
- Health Checks: Liveness vs Readiness Probes
- Distributed Consensus: Raft and Leader Election
- Transactional Outbox Pattern
- CAP Theorem and the PACELC Extension
- Cell-Based Architecture
- Backpressure and Flow Control
- Distributed Locking and Fencing Tokens
Performance
- Caching Strategies
- Rate Limiting Algorithms
- Database Sharding Strategies
- CDN and Edge Caching
- Load Balancing Algorithms
- Consistent Hashing
- Database Indexing Strategies
- Message Queues vs Event Streaming
- Read Replicas and Replication Lag
- Connection Pooling
Cost
- Compute Pricing Models
- Autoscaling Strategies
- FinOps: Cost Allocation, Tagging, Showback & Chargeback
- Data Storage Tiering and Lifecycle Policies
- Data Transfer and Egress Costs
- Spot Instances and Interruption Handling
Operational Excellence
- Three Pillars of Observability
- SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets
- Blue-Green and Canary Deployments
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- GitOps
- Postmortems and Blameless Incident Culture
- Feature Flags and Progressive Delivery
Organizational Complexity
- Strangler Fig Pattern
- Saga Pattern
- Event Sourcing and CQRS
- Team Topologies and Conway's Law
- Service Mesh
- Backend for Frontend (BFF) Pattern
- API Gateway Pattern
- Change Data Capture (CDC)
- API Versioning Strategies