Technology-Agnostic Reference
System Design Criteria
Architectural criteria, actionable practices, and an interactive evaluation checklist for engineering teams building in the age of intelligent systems.
Interactive Simulator · New
The Failure Lab
A living production system you can break. Kill the payments provider, poison the cache, trigger a retry storm — then toggle the resilience pattern that contains the blast radius, live.
5 Modules
Paradigm Shift
Why the AI era changes everything — the threat model shift, capability acceleration, and what it means for architecture.
System Design
Core patterns for distributed systems — request flows, failure domains, caching, messaging, and event-driven architecture.
Architecture Criteria
The evaluation framework — observability, operations, deployment, FinOps, compliance, and the interactive radar chart.
Cyber Security
Zero trust, threat modeling, least privilege, breach containment, rate limiting, and authentication patterns.
IA Systems
RAG architecture, MCP & agent interoperability, agent-as-principal, semantic caching, and human-in-the-loop patterns.