Final Architecture Review Checklist
Before shipping a design, review the complete lifecycle:
- Requirements: measurable SLIs/SLOs, capacity assumptions, data retention, user journeys.
- Interfaces: API contracts, schema evolution, timeouts, idempotency, authentication and authorization.
- Data: source of truth, indexes, transactions, replication lag, partition keys, backup and deletion.
- Failure: partial outages, retry storms, overload, dependency loss, recovery objectives, failback.
- Operations: metrics, logs, traces, alerts, runbooks, deployment gates, incident ownership.
- Security: trust boundaries, secrets, encryption, rate limits, audit trails, abuse cases.
- Economics: cost per workload, capacity headroom, growth assumptions, ownership and on-call burden.
A design review should produce actionable risks, owners, and validation experiments—not just a diagram approval. Use load tests, chaos experiments, threat modeling, restore drills, and staged rollout evidence to verify assumptions.
Key Takeaways
- Review the system's operational and data lifecycle, not only its happy path.
- Convert risks into owners and testable actions.
- A design is validated by evidence from realistic failure and load conditions.