Architecture & Platform
Overview
Architecture and platform decisions determine how readily systems can integrate, remain consistent, scale, and change. These principles favour cohesive service boundaries and shared capabilities while preserving clear interfaces, technology choice, and independence from individual service instances.
Choose a principle below to read its full reasoning.
Principles
Shared Platform
New services use the shared platform by default, with alternatives limited to needs the platform cannot meet.
Domain-Aligned Services
Service boundaries follow cohesive business domains, with exclusive data ownership and one authoritative implementation of each core business rule.
Distributed Consistency
Keep transactions within service boundaries and coordinate cross-service consistency through explicit eventual-consistency and compensation models.
Vendor Lock-in & Portability
Technology choices account for lock-in and preserve practical options to change providers, platforms, and dependencies.
Interoperability
Services integrate through explicit, reusable contracts that preserve shared meaning and evolve without breaking consumers.
Stateless Architecture
Services keep request handling independent of individual instances so they can scale, recover, and retry safely.