Production Web Architecture

Turn product flows into an operable system. Prefer the smallest architecture that removes the largest demonstrated risk.

Workflow

1. Map users, critical journeys, trust boundaries, data ownership, external services, files, asynchronous work, and failure consequences.
2. State workload assumptions and service objectives: traffic shape, latency, availability, durability, freshness, privacy, and cost.
3. Trace each critical path from browser through API, storage, queue, worker, and response. Mark transaction and idempotency boundaries.
4. Review scalability, reliability, security, data integrity, performance, observability, deployment, and cost.
5. Keep a modular monolith until independent scaling, ownership, deployment, or fault isolation creates a measurable extraction benefit.
6. Move slow or fragile work behind durable queues. Make handlers idempotent, retryable, observable, and visible to users.
7. Add caches only with ownership, key design, TTL, invalidation, stampede protection, and stale behavior defined.
8. Define migrations, rollout, rollback, health checks, alerts, runbooks, and cost guardrails before calling the design production-ready.
9. Validate the highest-risk flow with a failure test, load test, or end-to-end smoke test proportional to the risk.

Startup Defaults