The companion repository for the book Architecting at Scale (Packt): the per-chapter code, extended notes, and all 73 Architect's Prompts that go with the book.
Get the published book at Packt · Run ShopFlow · Browse the prompts
The runnable code lives in one TypeScript workspace under app/, with chapter
walkthroughs in ch1/ through ch16/. From the repository root:
cd app
npm run verifyThis installs the locked dependencies, builds the workspace, and runs the unit tests. See the ShopFlow setup guide for Node requirements and optional Redis integration tests. The Chapter 1 monolith deliberately contains the failure modes the book investigates; it is a teaching system, not a production starter.
ShopFlow is the running example throughout the book: an online store for home and lifestyle goods that begins as a monolith serving 100 orders a day and ends as a globally distributed, observable, resilient, cost-governed, AI-augmented system that keeps changing safely. Every chapter solves the problem the previous chapter's solution created; this repository holds the artifacts that go with that journey.
One folder per chapter, ch1 through ch16:
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
chN/prompts.md |
The Architect's Prompts from that chapter, verbatim, each with the When to use this line |
chN/*.md |
Extended notes, the detail that did not fit on the page |
chN/README.md |
Chapter walkthrough, with links to its implementation and tests |
app/ |
Shared ShopFlow workspace containing the runnable chapter implementations |
And at the root:
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
PROMPTS.md |
Index of all 73 Architect's Prompts across the book |
| Ch | Title | Prompts | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Scalability Mindset - When and Why to Scale | 2 | |
| 2 | Core Principles of Scalable Architecture | 3 | |
| 3 | Security-First and Compliance-First Architecture | 4 | |
| 4 | Scaling the Global Delivery Layer - Edge, CDNs, and Beyond | 4 | |
| 5 | Scaling the Modern Web Application – State, Performance, and Micro-Frontends | 5 | 6 |
| 6 | Architecting Scalable Services – Decomposition and API Design | 5 | |
| 7 | Scaling Service Infrastructure – Resilience, Mesh, and Compute | 5 | |
| 8 | Event-Driven Scaling – Decoupling with Messaging | 5 | |
| 9 | Caching Strategies – Faster and Cheaper Scaling | 5 | |
| 10 | Scaling Data and Databases – Storage, Queries, and Beyond | 5 | |
| 11 | Observability – Seeing and Understanding Your System | 5 | |
| 12 | Resilience and High Availability – Designing for Failure | 5 | |
| 13 | Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning | 5 | |
| 14 | Cost Optimization and Efficiency (FinOps) | 5 | |
| 15 | AI-First Architecture: Pragmatism Over Hype | 5 | |
| 16 | Continuous Experimentation and the Future-Proof System | 5 |
Every prompt is reproduced exactly as it appears in the book. They are deliberately demanding: each one asks for a decision with the reasoning attached, not a summary. Two things to do before you run one:
- Replace every
[bracketed placeholder]with your own data: a module inventory, a telemetry series, a cost breakdown. The prompts are built to reason over real numbers, and they produce generic advice when given generic input. - Check the When to use this line. The prompts are diagnostic instruments, and reaching for the wrong one is how you get a confident answer to a question you did not have.
The book uses specific technology so the trade-offs stay concrete. The table describes the book's architecture; the repository includes executable models of those decisions, not a complete deployment of every listed service. See the code map.
| Concern | Choice |
|---|---|
| Relational store | MySQL 8 (sharded by a fixed 1,024-bucket logical key from Chapter 10) |
| Cache | Redis (Chapter 9) |
| Search | Elasticsearch, fed by CDC (Chapter 10) |
| Object storage | S3-compatible, URL-only in the relational row (Chapter 10) |
| Messaging | Managed RabbitMQ, with Kafka as the measured migration target (Chapter 8) |
| Services | TypeScript / Node.js, six bounded contexts (Chapter 6) |
| Front end | React micro-frontends behind a shell (Chapter 5) |
| Observability | OpenTelemetry, traces, metrics, structured logs (Chapter 11) |
| Load testing | k6 (Chapter 2) |
| Agent governance | Runtime policy enforcement at a single chokepoint (Chapters 14–15) |
All 16 technical chapters have prompts and walkthroughs, with their implementations mapped
in app/README.md. The 73-prompt index is complete; Chapter 5 also has six
standalone extended notes. Unit tests run without infrastructure. The separate Redis suite
requires a running Redis instance and also runs in CI.
