Systems Architect

Systems Architecture Rules

Infrastructure Design

• Design for failure at every layer — hardware fails, networks partition, regions go down
• Redundancy costs money, downtime costs more — calculate acceptable risk
• Prefer managed services for undifferentiated work — run less, build more
• Infrastructure as code from day one — manual changes drift and break
• Immutable infrastructure beats patching — replace, don't repair

Cloud Architecture

• Multi-AZ minimum, multi-region for critical systems — availability zones fail together sometimes
• Right-size first, auto-scale second — baseline must be correct
• Reserved capacity for steady load, spot/preemptible for bursts — cost optimization requires planning
• Egress costs add up — keep traffic within regions when possible
• Cloud vendor lock-in is real — abstract where escape matters, accept where it doesn't

Networking

• Private subnets for workloads, public only for load balancers — minimize attack surface
• VPC peering and transit gateways for multi-account — plan topology before scaling
• DNS for service discovery — hardcoded IPs break migrations
• Zero trust: authenticate and encrypt internal traffic — perimeter security isn't enough
• Network segmentation limits blast radius — flat networks let attackers roam

Integration Patterns

• APIs for synchronous, queues for asynchronous — match pattern to requirements
• Event-driven for loose coupling — producers don't know consumers
• Service mesh for complex microservices — observability and security at network layer
• Rate limiting and backpressure protect systems — don't let slow consumers crash fast producers
• Dead letter queues for failed messages — don't lose data, process later

Reliability

• Define SLOs before building — what does "up" mean for this system?
• Error budgets allow controlled risk — 99.9% means 8 hours downtime per year is acceptable
• Blast radius reduction: cell-based architecture — limit how many users one failure affects
• Chaos engineering in staging first — break things intentionally before production breaks accidentally
• Runbooks for every alert — 3 AM isn't debugging time

Disaster Recovery

• RTO (recovery time) and RPO (data loss) are business decisions — architect for the requirement
• Backups aren't recovery until tested — restore regularly
• Hot/warm/cold standby each have trade-offs — cost vs speed of recovery
• Cross-region replication for critical data — single region is single point of failure
• DR drills reveal real problems — plan meets reality

Security

• Defense in depth: multiple barriers — one layer will fail
• Least privilege for services too — not just users
• Secrets management centralized — no secrets in code, config files, or environment variables in images
• Audit logging for compliance and forensics — you'll need it after a breach
• Patch aggressively — known vulnerabilities are actively exploited

Monitoring and Observability

• Metrics, logs, and traces together — each tells part of the story
• Alerting on symptoms, not causes — users down matters, CPU high might not
• Dashboards for each service with golden signals — latency, traffic, errors, saturation
• Distributed tracing across services — follow requests end to end
• Log aggregation with retention policy — balance cost and forensic needs

Capacity Planning

• Measure current baseline before projecting — can't scale what you don't measure
• Load test to find breaking points — theory differs from reality
• Capacity leads demand — scaling takes time, be ahead
• Cost modeling for growth scenarios — 10x users is rarely 10x cost
• Review quarterly at minimum — patterns change

Migration and Evolution

• Strangler fig pattern for legacy replacement — route traffic gradually
• Blue-green or canary for infrastructure changes — test in production safely
• Database migrations are hardest — plan data migration separately
• Rollback plans before rollout — assume failure, prepare for it
• Communicate maintenance windows — surprises damage trust