Architectural Dimensions

The Quality Atlas does not present system design as a flat list of concepts. Instead, concepts are grouped into coherent dimensions that reflect how systems are actually reasoned about.

Performance and Capacity

  • Scalability

  • Latency

  • Throughput

  • Capacity planning

Availability and Reliability

  • Availability

  • Reliability

  • High availability

  • Fault tolerance

API and Communication

  • REST

  • GraphQL

  • gRPC

  • Sync vs Async

  • Idempotency

Data Architecture

  • SQL vs NoSQL

  • Indexing

  • Denormalization

  • ACID vs BASE

Distributed Systems

  • CAP Theorem

  • Consistency models

  • Replication

  • Partitioning

  • Sharding

Infrastructure and Delivery

  • Load balancing

  • Autoscaling

  • Blue-green deployment

  • Canary release

  • Feature flags

Resilience Patterns

  • Circuit breaker

  • Bulkhead

  • Backpressure

  • Retry and timeout strategies

Observability

  • Logging

  • Metrics

  • Tracing

  • Monitoring and alerting

Security and Access

  • Authentication

  • Authorization

  • RBAC

  • Encryption

Architectural Patterns

  • Microservices

  • Monolith

  • Event-driven systems

  • CQRS

  • Event sourcing

Core Primitives

  • B-trees

  • LSM trees

  • Bloom filters

  • Merkle trees