Systems Architecture & Distributed Systems Topics
Large-scale distributed system design, service architecture, microservices patterns, global distribution strategies, scalability, and fault tolerance at the service/application layer. Covers microservices decomposition, caching strategies, API design, eventual consistency, multi-region systems, and architectural resilience patterns. Excludes storage and database optimization (see Database Engineering & Data Systems), data pipeline infrastructure (see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure), and infrastructure platform design (see Cloud & Infrastructure).
Multi-Tenancy and Isolation
Serving many tenants from shared infrastructure: tenancy models (silo, pool, bridge), data isolation, noisy-neighbor mitigation, per-tenant limits, and security boundaries between tenants. Covers the cost, isolation, and blast-radius tradeoffs of shared versus dedicated resources. The architecture layer specific to SaaS and platform products.
Observability and Monitoring for Distributed Systems
Understanding system behavior in production: metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, alerting, dashboards, and service mesh observability. Covers correlating signals across services, defining meaningful telemetry, and reducing mean-time-to-detect. The visibility layer that makes distributed systems operable at scale.
Distributed Systems Security and Trust
Securing communication and trust across a distributed system: service-to-service authentication and authorization, mutual TLS, zero-trust boundaries, secrets management, and multi-party protocols and distributed trust models. Covers securing data in transit and at rest across service boundaries and isolating tenant and network zones. The security-architecture concerns specific to distributed designs.