Level 11: Production Architecture
Design, operate and reason about a system at global scale — and put every previous level together. Level 11 of 11: 5 lessons on production architecture.
Outcome: Design, operate and reason about a system at global scale — and put every previous level together.
ShopFlow in 2030: millions of users in several regions. Load balancing, reliability engineering, security and multi-region design, closing with the full picture of every decision we made.
The pressure on ShopFlow: Global customers, strict SLOs, security audits and a 99.95% availability target.
Lessons in level 11
- Load Balancing & Horizontal Scaling — Spread traffic across instances and scale without sticky surprises.
- Reliability: SLOs, Error Budgets & Graceful Degradation — Decide how reliable is reliable enough, then engineer for it.
- Security Architecture for Backend Engineers — Authentication, authorisation, zero trust, secrets and threat modelling.
- Going Global: Multi-Region & Disaster Recovery — Active-passive vs active-active, RPO/RTO and data residency.
- ShopFlow 2030: The Whole Picture — Every decision from monolith to multi-region, and the trade-offs behind each one.
Source books
- Building Microservices — Sam Newman
- DDIA — Martin Kleppmann
- Software Architecture — Mark Richards, Neal Ford, Pramod Sadalage, Zhamak Dehghani
- Evolutionary Architecture — Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Patrick Kua, Pramod Sadalage