Architectural Design Principles
Overview
Design principles are timeless guidelines for structuring software systems. They provide direction on how to separate concerns, reduce coupling, and design for scalability and resilience. Unlike patterns (which are concrete solutions), principles are conceptual rules that inform architectural choices.
These lessons cover essential principles from Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, and SRE practices — each explained with Java-first examples and interview prep.
Lessons
Introduction to Architectural Design Principles
Why principles matter beyond SOLID, and how they guide large-scale systems.
Start Lesson →Dependency Rule (Clean Architecture)
Why dependencies must always point inward.
Start Lesson →Component Cohesion Principles (REP, CCP, CRP)
Grouping classes/modules for stability and reusability.
Start Lesson →Component Coupling Principles (ADP, SDP, SAP)
Structuring dependencies between components safely.
Start Lesson →System-Level Cohesion & Coupling
Extending modularity to services and systems.
Start Lesson →Domain-Driven Design Principles (DDD Lite)
Bounded contexts, aggregates, and ubiquitous language.
Start Lesson →Scalability & Availability Principles
CAP theorem and distributed trade-offs.
Start Lesson →Information Hiding in Architecture
Encapsulating internals with APIs/contracts.
Start Lesson →Principle of Least Knowledge at Service Boundaries
Minimizing dependencies in distributed systems.
Start Lesson →Security Principles in Architecture
Defense in depth, least privilege, fail securely.
Start Lesson →Architectural Trade-offs
Balancing performance, flexibility, and complexity.
Start Lesson →Evolutionary Architecture Principles
Strangler fig, fitness functions, modernization.
Start Lesson →Performance & Caching Principles
Latency, throughput, caching strategies.
Start Lesson →Resilience & Fault Tolerance Principles
Timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads.
Start Lesson →Observability Principles
Logs, metrics, traces, SLOs/SLIs/SLAs.
Start Lesson →