// Topics / AI and Systems Architecture

AI and Systems Architecture

Architecture is the set of decisions that become expensive to change later. In AI systems, those decisions usually sit around model access, retrieval, evaluation, data freshness, cost control, and ownership boundaries.

This hub connects AI architecture with older systems lessons: keep interfaces small, make failure modes explicit, and avoid distributing complexity before the team can operate it.

Start Here

Architecture Questions That Matter

Before adding another model, service, or queue, answer these:

  1. Where is the stable interface between product code and model behavior?
  2. How is context assembled, filtered, and refreshed?
  3. Which validation path catches bad output before users rely on it?
  4. What happens when the preferred model is slow, unavailable, expensive, or wrong?
  5. Who owns incidents caused by model, retrieval, or data drift?

Supporting Patterns

Retrieval and context:

Agents and tools:

Older systems tradeoffs:

Failure Modes

  • Letting prompts become hidden architecture.
  • Hard-coding provider behavior three layers deep.
  • Treating retrieval as a static index instead of a living data pipeline.
  • Running AI features without cost attribution, evaluation, and rollback paths.

References

96 entries tagged “AI and Systems Architecture”

    Content Marking Is a Pipeline, Not a Policy · 4 min The EU AI Act marking deadline for existing generative systems is 2 December. Provenance survives only what your pipeline keeps, so test it in CI. compliance ai architecture A Backup Model You Never Exercise Is Not a Backup · 4 min Vendor count is inventory; measured failover time is resilience. Shadow replay, a bounded canary, and a recovery clock with defined start and stop. ai reliability strategy Autonomy Without a Demotion Path Is Permission Creep · 4 min Teams can describe how agents earn autonomy. Few can take it back. Write the transition contract: trigger, authority, mechanics, re-entry. ai governance reliability MCP Grew Up. Your Integration Debt Has a Clock. · 4 min The July MCP revision started a 12-month deprecation clock. Use it to find every agent-to-tool boundary, give each an owner, and test it. ai architecture platform-engineering Your Real Token Price Is a Cache Hit Rate · 4 min For input-heavy agent loops, effective token cost rides on cached-token share. Track your hit rate, and measure the cold-cache premium before you switch. cost ai operations Garbage Context, Confident Answer · 4 min Most AI failures are context failures wearing a model's face. Score retrieval with groundedness and margin, check freshness against live state. ai reliability architecture Geopolitical Model Risk Is an Engineering Constraint · 4 min Export controls, gated releases, and open-to-closed reversals make model availability an architecture-review line item. ai architecture strategy Power Belongs on the AI Roadmap · 3 min Grid power and GPU quota arrive on lead times of months to years. Put region, capacity type, owner, and fallback next to every committed AI ramp. ai architecture strategy Regulatory Divergence Is a Routing Problem · 4 min One global AI policy is wrong in every market. Tag requests by jurisdiction, data class, and user type, then route policy like cost and capability. governance ai privacy Reliability Is the Autonomy Ceiling · 4 min How much autonomy to give an AI agent: bound its failure rate with the rule of three, shadow mode, and fault injection, then price it by failure cost. ai reliability operations Your Vendor's Balance Sheet Is Your Risk · 4 min AI vendor risk you can price: compare the API price to a self-hosted floor, lock deprecation notice and export rights at signing, fund a warm fallback. strategy ai cost Agent Identity Is the New Control Plane · 4 min AI agents need workload identity, not shared API keys: SPIFFE SVIDs, RFC 8693 token exchange, and Vault leases make access scoped, attributable, revocable. ai reliability security Agentic Systems at Scale: The New Reliability Contract · 4 min An AI agent reliability contract is real only where the control plane enforces it: scoped credentials, a deny-by-default tool gateway, a sandbox. ai reliability operations The AI Strategy Stack: What Boards Mistake for Moats · 4 min Models and prompt scaffolding are not AI moats. The defensible layer is a correction loop on your own work, tracked by escalation rate, and it depreciates. strategy ai executive The Executive Case for Local-First AI Infrastructure · 2 min When to run AI workloads locally and when to stay on cloud APIs: a placement rubric based on call frequency, data sensitivity, and fallback readiness. ai architecture cost How to Run an AI Incident Review That Changes Architecture, Not Slides · 2 min An AI incident review is done when it changes architecture, evals, alerting, or ownership. An eight-part template that ends in fixes, owners, and dates. reliability ai governance Build the System the Model Cannot Break Canon post — · 12 min A manifesto for AI-native organizations: twelve tenets across strategy, architecture, economics, and people, and the one test that matters in year two. opinion ai strategy AI Build vs. Buy in 2026: An Operational Cost Question · 3 min AI build vs. buy in 2026 turns on operational cost: who owns telemetry, fallbacks, and data residency. When to buy, when to build, and the hybrid default. strategy ai architecture Why Most Enterprise AI Architecture Fails in Year One · 3 min Enterprise AI architecture fails in year one when teams expect deterministic behavior from a statistical engine. Build failure boundaries and telemetry. architecture ai reliability Data Sovereignty by Design: Privacy as Architecture · 6 min Data privacy and residency are architecture constraints. Four minimum controls, zero-trust data access, and multi-region tradeoffs to build in early. privacy security compliance AI Team Structures 2026: Central, Embedded, and Hybrid Models · 8 min Central, embedded, or hybrid AI team? How to decide where AI ownership lives, with roles, tradeoffs, platform-to-product ratios, and scaling rules. teams ai architecture AI-Native Architecture Patterns 2026: Production Guide · 6 min AI-native architecture patterns for production: an AI gateway, a retrieval layer, an evaluation pipeline, fallbacks, cost control, and clear ownership. architecture ai engineering Scaling AI in the Enterprise Is a Management Problem · 4 min AI pilots work. What fails is going from five demos to fifty production features without an operating model. That's a management problem. business ai architecture Multi-Agent Orchestration: Four Patterns and Their Tradeoffs · 5 min Multi-agent systems are distributed systems with the usual coordination headaches. The four patterns I've seen work, and when each one falls apart. agents ai architecture Model Context Protocol in Go: Building an MCP Tool Server · 7 min I built a Model Context Protocol server in Go with mcp-go. The protocol layer is clean. Auth, permissions, and write safety are still on you. agents ai go AI Infrastructure at Scale Is Just Infrastructure · 4 min AI infrastructure at scale is just infrastructure. Gateways, caching, workload separation, budgets, and circuit breakers solve the same old problems. ai infrastructure architecture AI Agent Patterns in Go: Planning, Memory, Recovery · 7 min Single-prompt agents break on real tasks. Plan-execute-replan, orchestrated specialists, structured memory, and explicit recovery, with Go code. agents ai go Small LLMs in Production: Use the Smallest Model That Works · 3 min Most production LLM tasks are classification and extraction that don't need GPT-4. Where small models win, where they fail, and how to route. llm ai performance Context Window Budgets: Stop Stuffing Your LLM Prompts · 4 min Bigger context windows don't excuse sloppy prompts. Budget tokens per section, pin anchors, retrieve less, and measure quality against context size. llm ai architecture GPT-4o Changed the Interface, Not the Hard Part · 4 min GPT-4o puts text, vision, and audio in one model. That removes pipeline glue, but transport, devices, and consent stay hard. How I'd evaluate it. llm architecture ai LLM Structured Output in Go: JSON Schema, Validation, Retries · 7 min How to get reliable JSON from LLMs in Go with schemas, validation, repair loops, and typed contracts. llm api go Multi-Model LLM Routing and Fallbacks in Production · 4 min Betting on one LLM provider is a database with no failover. How I route between models, chain fallbacks, and log which model served each request. ai architecture llm Architecting AI-Native Applications (Without the Delusion) · 7 min AI-native apps differ from a model bolted onto a CRUD app. The layers, confidence routing, fallbacks, and feedback loops I use, with Go code. architecture ai engineering Scaling AI Features: GPUs, Rate Limits, and Backpressure · 4 min GPUs are scarce, rate limits are hard ceilings, and AI demos collapse under real traffic. The distributed systems patterns that keep AI features up. ai infrastructure architecture OpenAI DevDay 2023: What It Means for Build vs Buy · 4 min GPT-4 Turbo, the Assistants API, and GPTs moved OpenAI further up the stack. What that means for teams deciding which AI plumbing to build or buy. llm ai architecture AI Agent Architecture Patterns for Production · 6 min Agent demos impress. Production agents mostly don't. Planning, memory, least-privilege tool access, and evals: the systems design that decides what ships. ai agents llm RAG in Production: Patterns That Survive Real Traffic · 8 min RAG quality is retrieval quality. Chunking, hybrid search, query shaping, reranking, and evals for grounding LLMs in private data, with Go examples. llm ai go My First Week Building with GPT-4 · 4 min My first week with GPT-4 after its March 14 launch: where it beats GPT-3.5, what it costs, and why I route requests instead of switching everything over. ai llm architecture LLM Integration Patterns That Survive Production · 6 min LLM calls are slow, costly, and non-deterministic. Patterns for prompt versioning, structured output validation, RAG, tool guardrails, and fallbacks in Go. ai llm go Monorepo vs. Polyrepo: A Practical Decision Guide · 4 min Monorepo or polyrepo depends on coupling, team shape, and your appetite for build tooling. Here is how to decide without getting religious about it. architecture development developer-experience Go Concurrency Patterns I Use in Every Service · 7 min Worker pools, fan-out/fan-in, pipelines, and the cancellation discipline that keeps Go services predictable under load. go architecture backend Async Architecture: When to Go Async and When Not To · 5 min Async solves bursty traffic, slow dependencies, and team coupling, but the complexity tax is real. Queues, pub/sub, and streams: lessons from production. architecture Rate Limiting: The Boring Feature That Saves You at 3 AM · 4 min Token bucket, sliding windows, identity keys, response headers, and fail-open rules: how to pick and run rate limiting for high-traffic multi-tenant APIs. api backend go Distributed Systems Patterns I Keep Reaching For · 6 min Timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, sagas, outbox and inbox, backpressure: the distributed systems patterns that survive production. distributed-systems architecture microservices TypeScript Best Practices From a Go Developer · 4 min TypeScript is the best thing to happen to JavaScript, and that bar was low. Strict mode, boundary validation, and simple generics for large codebases. engineering architecture go Service Mesh Decision Guide: You Probably Don't Need One Yet · 5 min Service meshes pay off with dozens of services, many teams, and mTLS mandates. Most teams adopt one too early. Five questions to decide, plus alternatives. kubernetes architecture API Versioning: Pick One and Stop Overthinking It · 4 min Put the version in the URL for public APIs and in a header for internal ones. The real work of API versioning is deprecation and avoiding breaking changes. api architecture backend The December 2021 AWS us-east-1 Outage Was Predictable · 5 min The December 7 us-east-1 outage hit AWS control planes, not running workloads. Why it keeps catching teams out, and the multi-region basics that help. cloud incident-management reliability Event Sourcing in Go: Lessons From Financial Event Pipelines · 7 min Event sourcing in Go from a fintech content pipeline: aggregates, a Postgres event store, projections, snapshots, upcasters, and what I'd change. architecture go Most 'Technical Debt' Is Just Decisions You Disagree With Now · 4 min Most 'technical debt' is code that aged, not debt. How to spot real debt by its costs (incidents, delivery, security, hiring) and get fixes funded. technical-debt leadership architecture Feature Flags at Scale: Ownership, Expiry, and Cleanup · 5 min 847 feature flags, about 200 with owners. Lessons from production codebases on flag types, ownership rules, fail modes, and cleanup. ci-cd devops go Zero Trust Architecture: Identity First, Then Segmentation · 6 min Zero trust from cyber-defense exercises and a large telecom: identity first, default-deny segmentation, device posture, and common mistakes. security architecture infrastructure Serverless Databases vs Postgres: Most Teams Need Postgres · 3 min Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB, Fauna, and PlanetScale solve problems most teams don't have. Postgres with a connection pooler is still the default. cloud databases architecture API Gateway Patterns: Edge, BFF, and Service Mesh Ingress · 5 min Edge gateways, BFFs, and mesh ingress: what belongs in an API gateway, what doesn't, and what I learned running them at my infrastructure startup and a large telecom. api microservices architecture Data Engineering Patterns: Batch vs. CDC vs. Streaming · 6 min Batch vs. CDC vs. streaming ingestion, compared from building financial data pipelines at a fintech startup, and how to pick by real latency needs. data metrics architecture Multi-Cloud Is Mostly a Marketing Strategy · 4 min Multi-cloud sounds great in vendor pitches. In practice, it doubles your operational burden for benefits most teams will never need. cloud architecture infrastructure API Gateway Build vs Buy: Kong, Envoy, or Custom Go · 6 min I've built a custom Go gateway, run Kong in prod, evaluated Envoy, and used managed cloud gateways. What I recommend after doing each wrong at least once. api go kubernetes GraphQL Federation: Why Most Teams Don't Need It · 4 min Most teams adopting GraphQL federation don't need it. When it makes sense, when REST is fine, and why conference talks are a bad basis for architecture. api architecture opinion Event-Driven Architecture: What I Got Wrong, What Survived · 10 min Lessons from building event-driven systems at the fintech startup and my infrastructure startup: what works, what silently corrupts your data, and Go patterns that hold up. architecture go distributed-systems Serverless vs Containers: Where the Math Stops Working · 5 min Lambda vs Fargate at different traffic levels, with mid-2020 prices: where serverless wins, where containers win, and where the cost crossover sits. cloud containers architecture Async-First Remote Work: Stop Recreating the Office on Zoom · 3 min Most teams that went remote just moved the office onto video calls. Async communication is the real unlock. These are the rules I work by. remote-work architecture leadership Scaling WebRTC Video: SFUs, Simulcast, and TURN Costs · 6 min Most companies building video calling are making the same architecture mistakes. What I keep seeing, and how to fix it before your SFUs fall over. infrastructure architecture API Versioning Strategies: Why I Use URL Path Versioning · 5 min After versioning messes at multiple companies, I landed on URL path versioning for anything public. The alternatives didn't survive contact with reality. api architecture PostgreSQL Replication Patterns: Async, Sync, and Quorum · 8 min A practical breakdown of replication modes, topologies, and the tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and not losing your users' data at 3am. databases distributed-systems architecture FinOps for Engineers: The Cloud Bill as a Design Document · 6 min Cloud cost is an architecture problem disguised as a spreadsheet. Read your AWS bill as an engineering signal: unit costs, data transfer, idle spend. cost cloud architecture Edge Computing Is Usually Premature Optimization · 3 min Edge computing is real, but most teams adopting it don't have an edge problem. They have an architecture problem they're solving with geography. infrastructure architecture distributed-systems Message Queue Patterns: Idempotency, Retries, Dead Letters · 8 min Queues look simple on a whiteboard. Messaging patterns I learned the hard way at three startups: idempotent consumers, jittered retries, dead letters. architecture go backend Data Mesh: Fix Data Ownership Before Architecture · 3 min Most data problems are ownership problems. Data mesh gets that right. But adopting it as an architecture diagram exercise misses the point entirely. data architecture engineering Monolith to Microservices: When to Split and How · 5 min Most teams shouldn't migrate to microservices. How to tell if you should, and how to split with the strangler pattern without wrecking delivery. microservices architecture go Multi-Region Architecture: You Probably Don't Need It Yet · 5 min Multi-region is a commitment most teams make too early. When it actually pays off, the patterns that work, and why data is the part that ruins your week. architecture cloud distributed-systems Designing for Failure: Timeouts, Circuit Breakers, Failover · 3 min Timeouts, blast-radius isolation, fallbacks, circuit breakers, and tested failover: the rules I follow so one slow dependency can't take down everything. reliability architecture distributed-systems Async Job Processing Patterns: Queues, Retries, Idempotency · 6 min Background job patterns from a fintech data pipeline: priority queues, idempotent workers, backoff with jitter, dead letter queues, and the outbox. backend architecture reliability Scaling Engineering Teams: What Breaks at 10, 25, and 50 · 5 min How engineering teams change as they grow: what breaks at each size, explicit ownership, written decisions, and process that follows pain. engineering leadership teams API Rate Limiting: Token Buckets, Redis, and Headers · 6 min Rate limiting APIs at a fintech startup: choosing the limit key, token bucket vs other algorithms, Redis Lua scripts, headers, and fail-open. api backend architecture Partial Failure in Distributed Systems: Lessons From Fintech · 6 min Designing distributed systems for partial failure at a fintech startup: timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and idempotency. distributed-systems reliability architecture Serverless Patterns and Anti-Patterns: Lessons From Lambda · 6 min Where AWS Lambda shines and where it hurts, from serverless pipelines at a fintech startup: event processing, cold starts, VPCs, and cost. cloud architecture Database Sharding: You Probably Don't Need It Yet · 8 min Most teams shard too early. What to exhaust first on a single PostgreSQL primary, when sharding is justified, how to pick a shard key, and what it costs. databases architecture Microservices Security: Identity, mTLS, and Secrets · 6 min Split the monolith and every internal call becomes attack surface. Service identity, mTLS, authorization patterns, and secrets management in practice. security microservices architecture Event Sourcing in Practice: What I Got Right and Wrong · 7 min Event sourcing and CQRS at a fintech startup: event design, aggregate boundaries, idempotent projections, schema evolution, and modeling mistakes. architecture distributed-systems business Zero Trust Architecture: Building It at a Fintech Startup · 5 min How I replaced castle-and-moat security at a fintech startup with zero trust: identity-first access, an access proxy, and micro-segmentation. security architecture infrastructure Technical Debt Triage: A Simple Prioritization Framework · 4 min Score tech debt by impact times change frequency to decide what to fix now, schedule, or accept. How it cut our 47-item list to six at a fintech startup. technical-debt engineering strategy Async-First Engineering Teams: Cutting Decision Latency · 4 min How our fintech team cut meetings and decision latency across time zones: written decisions, response-time rules, and calls only when they earn it. remote-work leadership teams Multi-Region Architecture: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me · 6 min What I learned evaluating multi-region at the fintech startup: the patterns that work, the ones that burn you, and when you should even bother. architecture distributed-systems cloud Serverless Patterns for Production: Lessons from AWS Lambda · 3 min Running AWS Lambda for a fintech data pipeline: one function per job, connection reuse, Step Functions vs choreography, cold starts, idempotency, DLQs. cloud architecture API Versioning Strategies: What Works and What Doesn't · 4 min URL path, query, header, or no API versioning? What worked for a fintech partner API, what counts as breaking, and how to deprecate cleanly. api architecture Data Pipelines That Survive Production: How I Build Them · 6 min Every data pipeline I built at a fintech startup broke. Raw storage, idempotent writes, boundary validation, and output-shape alerts made them recoverable. data reliability architecture Event-Driven Architecture: Why We Switched and What Broke · 5 min Event-driven architecture lessons from a fintech and a mobility startup: Kafka vs RabbitMQ, event design, idempotency, sagas, and when not to bother. architecture microservices GraphQL vs REST: Pick the Boring One · 3 min GraphQL vs REST, from a fintech and a mobility startup: GraphQL for varied clients and connected data, REST for CRUD and HTTP caching, often both. api architecture Why We Chose Go for Our Backend Services · 5 min How Go replaced Python and Node as our default backend language at a mobility startup, and the tradeoffs we accepted. go backend engineering Scaling PostgreSQL: Why Scaling Up Beats Sharding · 8 min How we scaled PostgreSQL for a high-volume ingestion pipeline with PgBouncer, streaming replicas, and partitioning, and why sharding comes last. databases architecture engineering Building Resilient Systems: Lessons from Production Failures · 7 min Production incidents show where architecture bends and breaks. Lessons on designing for failure, limiting blast radius, and making recovery routine. reliability architecture engineering REST API Design Principles That Stand the Test of Time · 5 min Lessons from building a high-volume data API: the REST conventions that actually matter, the ones that don't, and why consistency beats cleverness. api engineering architecture Postgres vs MySQL in 2016: A Practical Comparison · 5 min A grounded look at PostgreSQL and MySQL as of April 2016, focusing on integrity, query power, and operational tradeoffs rather than benchmark hype. databases architecture engineering AWS Lambda: When Serverless Makes Sense and When It Doesn't · 4 min AWS Lambda fits short, bursty, event-driven work. Five questions to decide, and where the 5-minute limit, cold starts, and steady-load costs bite. cloud architecture The True Cost of Technical Debt, and How to Measure It · 3 min Tech debt gets ignored until you price it. Track cycle-time drift, incident attribution, and engineer-days lost, then pitch paydown as a business tradeoff. technical-debt engineering leadership Microservices vs Monolith: Why Small Teams Should Wait · 5 min Most teams adopt microservices too early and pay for complexity they don't need. A modular monolith ships faster and keeps the option to split later. architecture microservices startups
All topics →