Design Principles

I am currently involved in the design phase of a project for a client, and have been thinking a lot about design principles, the sort of things that apply to all technologies and projects equally.

Readers of the blog will know that I have strong ideas on design and architectural form, but I felt a sense of validation when I came across a set of design principles that Amazon uses in the formulation of their elastic cloud technology stack.

The principles here map almost one to one to those which I hold and apply daily to my projects and architectures, these include:

• Decentralization: Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.
• Asynchrony: The system makes progress under all circumstances.
• Autonomy: The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based on local information.
• Local responsibility: Each individual component is responsible for achieving its consistency; this is never the burden of its peers.
• Controlled concurrency: Operations are designed such that no or limited concurrency control is required.
• Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.
• Controlled parallelism: Abstractions used in the system are of such granularity that parallelism can be used to improve performance and robustness of recovery or the introduction of new nodes.
  Decompose into small well-understood building blocks: Do not try to provide a single service that does everything for everyone, but instead build small components that can be used as building blocks for other services.
• Symmetry: Nodes in the system are identical in terms of functionality, and require no or minimal node-specific configuration to function.
• Simplicity: The system should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler).

Symmetry I perhaps use a bit differently, I apply it to the design of components, where by one component although different in function follows the same structure and layout of the others, so every bit of the system is symmetric to the others with regards to standards and layout.
Follow these, and good things will follow I promise!

I believe that process and architecture are different aspects of the same thing, so by aligning these principles with an architecture and process that support them you are putting blocks into place that will lead to success.