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Architecture

Reference architectures with the failure modes written down

25 system designs for SaaS, fintech, AI and regulated workloads. Each one sets out its constraints, components, data flow and the ways it fails, so you can weigh the trade-offs before committing to a build.

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How each blueprint is laid out

Constraints first, then the parts that meet them

Every design follows the same order: the constraints it has to meet, the components and their typical stack, the path data takes through the system, the ways it fails and how each failure is contained, then the questions teams ask before building it.

These are illustrative reference architectures, not records of client systems. A real design is fitted to your traffic, data and compliance scope.

Blueprint library

Start from the design closest to yours

25 blueprints

System design 01

Multi-tenant B2B SaaS reference architecture on AWS

A reference architecture for B2B SaaS on AWS that pools compute and database capacity across tenants, while PostgreSQL row-level security keeps each tenant's data isolated.

5 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 02

Double-entry financial ledger with event sourcing and Kafka

An immutable double-entry ledger where every posting balances, a retried request never posts twice, and any account's history can be replayed for auditors.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 03

Enterprise RAG pipeline: hybrid search and re-ranking

Document Q&A that answers from your own sources with exact citations, respects document permissions, and says so when the sources don't contain the answer.

5 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 04

Telehealth infrastructure on AWS designed for HIPAA

An AWS environment built around HIPAA's technical safeguards: encrypted video visits, tamper-evident audit trails and least-privilege access to patient data. Compliance also depends on your policies and risk analysis, not the infrastructure alone.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 05

High-throughput IoT telemetry pipeline (100k messages per second)

Ingest, process and analyze industrial IoT sensor streams with sub-second dashboard updates, buffering at every hop so a dropped link delays data instead of losing it.

5 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 06

Zero-downtime database migration and replication

A method for moving a multi-terabyte production database to a new engine or host while it keeps serving traffic, with a rollback path at every stage.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 07

Edge-cached headless e-commerce storefront

Serve catalog pages from edge caches close to shoppers, while keeping prices and stock accurate at the moment of purchase.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 08

SOC 2 Type 2 readiness architecture on AWS

A Terraform-managed AWS baseline that collects control evidence automatically. We prepare the evidence; the audit opinion is issued by your independent CPA firm.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 09

Low-latency crypto order execution engine in Rust

A Rust engine that ingests market depth, evaluates arbitrage signals and places orders, with no heap allocation on the hot path and a sub-millisecond internal latency target.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 10

Autonomous customer support AI agent with tool execution

Stateful AI agents that resolve routine support tickets by querying your CRM and order systems, act only through approved tools, and hand off to a person when rules or confidence require it.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 11

Serverless video transcoding and HLS streaming pipeline

A cost-efficient transcoding pipeline that turns user uploads into adaptive HLS streams for global delivery.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 12

Micro-frontend architecture with Module Federation

Let separate frontend teams deploy independently into one customer portal, with shared dependencies loaded once and a single sign-in.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 13

Industrial IoT predictive maintenance MLOps platform

An MLOps platform that flags likely machinery failures early enough to schedule repairs, instead of finding them as unplanned downtime.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 14

Multi-region active-active database architecture

Keep serving reads and writes through a full regional outage by running a distributed SQL database active-active across three or more regions.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 15

Headless Shopify storefront on the Next.js App Router

A headless Shopify storefront on Next.js: server-rendered product pages, fast faceted search and Shopify's own checkout, with the theme layer replaced by your design system.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 16

Tamper-evident audit logging engine for enterprise SaaS

An audit logging platform that makes tampering detectable with cryptographic hash chains and write-once storage, with search and export built for auditors.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 17

Automated document intelligence and OCR extraction pipeline

Turn large volumes of PDFs, scans and invoices into validated relational data with hybrid OCR and LLM extraction, sending low-confidence fields to people.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 18

High-performance feature flagging and experimentation engine

Feature flags and A/B experiments evaluated in application memory, so a flag check never waits on the network and keeps working when the flag service is down.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 19

Multiplayer real-time whiteboard with CRDTs and WebSockets

Collaborative multiplayer web apps in the style of Figma or Miro, built on conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) and optimistic canvas rendering.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 20

Edge rate-limiting and DDoS mitigation architecture

Protect backend APIs from scraping, credential stuffing and volumetric DDoS attacks with token-bucket rate limiting at the edge.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 21

Automated code review and security scanner AI agent

Automated pull request review that catches injection risks, leaked secrets and architectural anti-patterns before a human reviewer starts.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 22

HL7 and FHIR healthcare data lakehouse on Databricks

Unify fragmented EHR feeds into a FHIR R4 lakehouse on Delta Lake, with de-identified datasets for research and access controls built for HIPAA.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 23

Real-time geospatial fleet tracking and geofencing engine

Track fleets of 100,000+ delivery vehicles in real time, with sub-second GPS ingestion, geofence alerts and spatial queries that stay fast.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 24

High-reliability enterprise webhook dispatch system

Customer-facing webhooks with signed payloads, retries with backoff and jitter, and delivery logs developers can inspect and replay themselves.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

System design 25

Enterprise hybrid search engine: dense vectors and BM25

An enterprise search engine that combines the semantic understanding of dense vectors with the exact-match precision of BM25 lexical search.

4 key subsystemsView blueprint

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