Architect's Reference

Lookup tables for the decisions you make more than once. Articles are written once; these are revised whenever the underlying numbers move — and every page carries the date it was last verified, plus the sources it was verified against.

6 references · 34 questions answered · 63 terms defined · 3 tools · Last reviewed

Searches 106 pages, questions, terms and tools

Performance & Latency

1 entry
Referenceref.01
Performance & Latency

Latency Numbers Every Engineer Should Know — 2026

The orders of magnitude that decide your architecture, re-measured for NVMe, DDR5, 25GbE and LLM inference.

Reviewed 9 min

Distributed Systems

2 entries
Referenceref.02
Distributed Systems

The Distributed Systems Failure Catalog

Fourteen ways distributed systems fail — trigger, telemetry signature, mitigation, and the fix that makes it worse.

Reviewed 16 min
Referenceref.03
Distributed Systems

Consistency Models Reference

Linearizability to eventual, serializable to read committed, CAP to PACELC — and what each real database actually gives you by default.

Reviewed 12 min

Quality Attributes

1 entry
Referenceref.04
Quality Attributes

Architecture Fitness Functions Catalog

Sixty automated checks that turn architectural intentions into a build that fails — coupling, latency, resilience, security, cost, and LLM evals.

Reviewed 14 min

Data Stores

1 entry
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Data Stores

Data Store Selection Matrix

Thirteen storage categories, what each is genuinely good at, where PostgreSQL is still enough — and what a second store actually costs you.

Reviewed 13 min

Agent Engineering

1 entry
Referenceref.06
Agent Engineering

Agent Architecture Patterns

Eight patterns from a single call to multi-agent, with the escalation order, the controls each one needs, and the failure mode each one has.

Reviewed 15 min

Straight to the answer

34 questions this desk answers

If you came here mid-decision, start here rather than with a document title. Each one links to the answer itself, not the page it sits on.

Latency Numbers Every Engineer Should Know — 2026

The Distributed Systems Failure Catalog

Consistency Models Reference

Architecture Fitness Functions Catalog

Data Store Selection Matrix

Agent Architecture Patterns

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Frequently asked

How current are these numbers?

Every page carries the date it was last verified and a changelog of what changed on that date, so you can see a figure's age before you rely on it. Pages are revised when the hardware, the practice or a vendor default moves — not on a publishing schedule.

Can I cite this in a design review or ADR?

Yes, and each page lists the sources every figure was checked against, with the date it was checked — cite those alongside the page so the argument survives without you. Treat the numbers as order-of-magnitude inputs that frame the trade-off, not as a prediction of what your system will do.

Can I feed these pages to an AI assistant?

Yes. Every reference page serves its full text as plain markdown at its own URL with /llms.txt appended, so you can paste the whole table into a coding agent or an architecture chat instead of asking it to recall numbers it will get wrong by three orders of magnitude.

Machine-readable: append llms.txt to any reference URL for the full text as markdown — for example /reference/latency-numbers-2026/llms.txt. Paste one into a coding agent rather than asking it to recall the numbers from memory.