Systems
Architecture before ornament
Making a system look impressive is easy. The hard part is deciding what has to keep working when it's under load.
By David Discua · Last updated
The visible parts of a system are what people notice first. The architecture is what has to hold up when traffic, failures and new requirements all show up in the same week.
We start with boundaries: what owns state, what can fail on its own, and which interfaces are allowed to change. Those calls are much cheaper to make on a whiteboard than in production.
A complete-looking diagram doesn't prove much. What matters is whether a good engineer can run the system without asking the person who built it.