03Module
Observability, Operations & Evaluation
Observability is an architectural property, not a tooling choice. Maintainability determines whether changes are safe and fast, or risky and slow.
Observability & Maintainability
Understand the system from its outputs. Can you explain any anomaly without SSH-ing into production?
Operations
How you ship, how much it costs, and what the law requires.
Architecture Evaluation Checklist
Use this to evaluate any system design. Key dimensions to assess.
Architecture Evaluation
Score your system across 10 dimensions. Your scores persist in localStorage.
Score each dimension: 0 = Absent, 3 = Optimized
Architecture Evaluation Checklist
0/10
Security
- -Every boundary authenticated?
- -Rate limits enforced?
- -Secrets in vault?
- -Least privilege applied?
Zero Trust
- -Trust verified per-request?
- -Workloads identity-aware (SPIFFE/SPIRE)?
- -OAuth flows matched to use case?
- -Token rotation automated?
Scalability
- -Components scale independently?
- -State externalized?
- -Load balancing with health checks?
- -Caching strategy defined?
Resilience
- -Circuit breakers on dependencies?
- -Idempotency keys on mutations?
- -Chaos engineering tested?
- -Graceful degradation defined?
Observability
- -Explain anomalies from telemetry?
- -SLIs/SLOs/error budgets defined?
- -Alert on symptoms, not causes?
- -Cache hit rates monitored?
Maintainability
- -Teams deploy independently?
- -API contracts versioned (expand-and-contract)?
- -ADRs for every decision?
- -Conway's Law accounted for?
Data
- -Delivery guarantees chosen per topic?
- -Saga compensations defined?
- -Schema evolution via registry?
- -DLQs monitored?
AI-Readiness
- -Tool interfaces standardized (MCP)?
- -Agents as principals with least privilege?
- -Human oversight designed?
- -Semantic caching for cost?
Cost
- -Resources attributed?
- -Token budgets enforced?
- -AI inference routed by complexity?
- -Pagination cursor-based?
Compliance
- -Audit trails provable?
- -24h incident reporting?
- -AI decisions explainable?
- -SBOM automated?