Build an architecture
Architecture Lab
Build and validate service topologies after practicing verbal constraint reasoning. This lab tests placement, direction, paths, cardinality, and redundancy without changing the Deconstructor task.
Turn the decision into a working topology
Deconstructor asks which words decide the answer. Here, you place services, connect them in the required direction, and check whether the design satisfies every rule.
Global static site with a private S3 origin
Aster Labs publishes a static documentation and marketing site: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and about 900 product screenshots, held in one S3 bucket in eu-west-1. Readers open it from three continents, and the two-person platform team wants every asset answered by a cache close to the reader rather than the single Region. A security review closed with one rule: viewers may reach the site only through the CDN, and no browser request may read an object from the bucket itself. Which architecture keeps the S3 origin private while serving the site from the edge?
Stateless web tier that survives an AZ outage
Halide Health runs a stateless internal portal on one m5.large EC2 instance in eu-central-1a. When that Availability Zone lost power in March, the portal was dark for four hours while an engineer rebuilt it by hand from the release AMI. The platform lead wants the next outage absorbed by the platform: capacity must survive the loss of one Availability Zone, and a failed instance must be replaced with no page. Which design keeps the portal serving through the loss of one Availability Zone with no operator action?
Private-subnet fleet reaching S3 without the internet
Corvid Analytics runs a 40-instance Spark fleet in the private subnets of a VPC in us-east-2, reading and writing multi-gigabyte Parquet objects in two S3 buckets all day. The VPC has no internet gateway today, and the platform security standard forbids adding one, a NAT device, or any other route to the public internet from those subnets. Finance has already flagged the data-transfer line, so the team wants no new hourly charges, and the thin on-call rota rules out another instance to patch. How should the fleet reach Amazon S3 from those private subnets with the least added charge?
Absorb flash-sale order bursts without losing messages
Brightline Supply runs its order API on ECS, and each request writes the order straight into an RDS for PostgreSQL instance that downstream fulfilment and finance both read. During last month's flash sale arrivals jumped from 40 to 900 orders a second; the database saturated, API latency climbed, and about 3,000 checkout requests timed out and were never recorded. The platform lead wants arrival spikes held durably until the database can take them, and any order that keeps failing parked somewhere the on-call engineer can inspect rather than retried forever. Fulfilment and finance already query the relational order tables, so RDS must stay the system of record. Which architecture should the platform lead adopt?
Order portal: zone loss, shared uploads, no rewrite
A media operations team runs a three-tier order portal on EC2 in a single Availability Zone; customer uploads are written to instance-local EBS volumes and a self-managed MySQL 8.0 server runs on a separate EC2 host. An Availability Zone impairment last quarter took the portal offline for four hours, and the team restored from the previous night's logical dump. The portal must survive the loss of one Availability Zone, database failover may lose no more than a few seconds of committed writes, and every web instance must read and write one shared upload directory. The team will not rewrite SQL statements or POSIX file paths, and multi-Region disaster recovery stays out of scope this budget cycle. Which design meets every requirement with the least change to the application code?