Design

I was frustrated by the gap between stateless and stateful applications in the cloud. While I could easily spin up a stateless application as a “serverless” function in any major cloud provider and pretty much forget about it, persisting data between requests was a game of pick two among three: cheap, strongly consistent, portable. Could I solve portability and lack of transactions myself with a single client-side solution? I thought it would be possible through object storage (e.g. AWS S3), which is strongly consistent, ubiquitous and cheap. ...

What is a design document? When is it useful to have one? How to make it useful? These are the questions I’m going to address in this post. The goal is to provide some bite sized, easy to remember guidelines. My promise to you is that after this post, you’ll be faster and more effective in making and reviewing designs. This is a written version of a talk I gave at my current employer. Since it was well received and helped a few folks, I decided to make it more available. ...