Architecture Tenets

Over my career working in the online / distributed software arena, I have honed in on the following architecture tenets that I tried to deploy in any internet scale architecture problem.

Separation of Concerns
Build autonomous, decoupled services - SOA

• Define Clear contracts (Semantic, SLA)
• Define Explicit boundaries
• Backward & Forward Compatibility
• Versioning

Design to Scale Out
Don’t rely purely on Moore’s law. Systems should be decoupled and/or partitioned to scale out

• No Single Choke points
• Partitioning should be Fine grained
• Be able to run on Commodity Hardware
• Designed for GEO readiness

Design for Change
Changes are the norm not the exception

• Design applications to be modular and extensible
• Design components to be flexible and configurable

Simplicity
Complicated designs fail in complicated and expensive ways

• Simplified Operability (Instrumentation/Monitoring/Tools)
• Simplified Debugging (Root Cause Analysis) 
• Simplified Ramp up 
• Diagnostic Capabilities

Design for Failure
Failures are the norm not the exception

• No Single Point of Failure 
• Services should be resilient (Run in the wild) 
• Graceful Degradation of services 
• Deployments should be automatable 
• Ability to roll back releases