2025
- SLO-driven architecture treats the SLO as upstream of the design. If your SLO has never caused you to ship later, it isn't doing the work.
2024
- Every modernization arrives with a stated goal and a much larger implicit one. The modernization that fails is the one where the implicit architecture was never named.
- A security pattern adopted without a threat model is a control with no clear job. The patterns aren't the problem. The application is.
- Containers were sold on consistency. The bill arrived in installments: orchestration, networking, security, observability. An honest audit of what the decision bought.
2023
- Most cloud architecture reviews produce a deck that gets filed. A useful review produces decisions framed for the people who can make them.
- A Dockerfile is six lines and a dozen architectural commitments. Most teams write them by copy-paste. Few read them as decisions.
2022
- The same architecture decision can be approved by one audience and rejected by another in the same quarter. Which document each was reading is the difference.
- A cross-account database move is the diagnostic, not the work. It surfaces architectural decisions you've been making implicitly for years.
- The shape of your IaC architecture is downstream of team size. Most pain comes from running yesterday's architecture at today's scale.
- Cloud architecture debt has four shapes: governance, operational, knowledge, optionality. Read the shape before you decide what to pay down.