Architecture guides
Practical guides from the reviewing side of the table: what I've learned from a few hundred cloud architecture reviews. No company specifics — just the questions, patterns and templates that apply anywhere.
- Guide 1 The Architecture Review Checklist: 41 Questions I Ask The questions that come up in almost every cloud architecture review I run — compute, ownership, security, data, networking, resilience, operations and cost — as a checklist you can use before yours.
- Guide 2 How to Prepare for an Architecture Review What to bring to a cloud architecture review so it's one meeting, not three: entry criteria, the diagrams reviewers need, the cross-cutting concerns people forget, and how to handle open questions.
- Guide 3 The Compute Ladder: Serverless-First, Then Work Backwards A simple order of preference for where code runs — SaaS, serverless, containers, servers — why each rung up removes work, and how to design the ideal version first and only step down for a real constraint.
- Guide 4 Cloud Architecture Anti-Patterns (and What to Do Instead) Seventeen patterns I flag again and again in cloud architecture reviews — glue-code functions, synchronous long jobs, polling, credentials on disk, jump hosts — each with the alternative I recommend.
- Guide 5 Architecture Diagrams and Decision Records Reviewers Trust How to draw cloud architecture diagrams that answer questions before they're asked, and a lightweight architecture decision record (ADR) template for the choices you'll be asked to defend.
- Guide 6 Guardrails and Paved Roads: Scaling Cloud Architecture Across Teams How a central cloud team can help dozens of teams build well without becoming a bottleneck: configuration as a service, compliance as code, reusable IaC constructs, identity-based segmentation and small blast radii.