OPENXEL Infra · system architecture

System architecture, drawn beside the estate

Bought by Platform, SRE and the CTO. Ten questions a day and ten thousand a day are different systems, and which one you are building is a decision rather than a discovery.

The failure

What goes wrong here

Ten questions a day and ten thousand are different systems. Throughput, p99 latency, capacity, cost per request and failure behavior are properties you either budget before the build or discover after launch, on the customer.

The estate does not move to accommodate any of this. The new architecture has to arrive beside it.

What we build

  • The target architecture drawn beside the legacy one, with the boundary between them named
  • Serving and gateway design with a stated capacity ceiling
  • Throughput, p99 and cost-per-request budgets agreed before the first commit
  • Load tests against real traffic shapes rather than synthetic averages
  • Observability that answers what failed, where, and at what cost
The target architecture drawn beside the legacy estate Two systems side by side. On the left the legacy estate containing the system of record, batch jobs and integrations. On the right the target architecture with a gateway, services and a retrieval path. Between them a named boundary. The new system reads from the estate and writes back through the boundary. Capacity, latency and cost budgets are set before the build, and a tested rollback path returns to the legacy route. the legacy estate — cannot be paused System of record Batch jobs Integrations the boundary, named target architecture Gateway Services Retrieval and context reads writes back budgeted before the build throughput p99 cost per request rollback — tested, stays available
The architecture note, in one picture. The new system is drawn beside the estate rather than in place of it, the boundary between them is named, and the budgets are agreed before the first commit.
The artifact

What you keep

A migration architecture note: the new system beside the estate, with the budgets on the page.

Adjacency

What ships beside it

An architecture is sized against the data it has to read. These get designed together or they get redesigned later. See data engineering.

Send us the problem

Describe what is stuck. We will come back with an architecture, a timeline and the first commit.

Send us the problem See the six-step path