Principles
Architecture principles
These are not aspirational values — they're the defaults applied when weighing a trade-off.
- 01
Infrastructure as Code over manual operations
If a change to production cannot be expressed in version control, it is not a repeatable process.
- 02
Observability is a feature, not an afterthought
Metrics, logs, and traces are designed alongside the system, not bolted on after the first incident.
- 03
Simplicity scales better than cleverness
A boring solution that the whole team understands outlives a clever one that only its author can operate.
- 04
Automate first, optimize later
Remove manual steps before tuning performance — most reliability problems are process problems in disguise.
- 05
Measure before changing architecture
Architectural decisions are justified by data — throughput, latency, cost, incident history — not by trend.
- 06
Security by design
Identity, encryption, and least-privilege access are part of the initial design, not a hardening pass before launch.
- 07
Reliability over novelty
New technology earns its place by solving a real constraint, not by being new.
- 08
Documentation is part of the deliverable
A system is not done until the people operating it can understand it without asking the person who built it.
- 09
Small, reversible changes beat big rewrites
Incremental migrations with a rollback path consistently outperform big-bang cutovers in enterprise environments.
- 10
Design for operators, not only developers
The on-call engineer at 3am is a first-class user of every system that gets built.