External Resources — Architecture¶

Well-Architected Frameworks (Official)¶

Resource	What it is
AWS Well-Architected Framework	The definitive AWS reference — 6 pillars, 100+ best practice questions
AWS Well-Architected Tool	Free interactive review tool in the AWS console
AWS Well-Architected Labs	Hands-on labs for each pillar — actually run the checks
GCP Architecture Framework	Google's equivalent — 6 pillars with GCP-specific guidance
GCP Architecture Center	Reference architectures, blueprints, and deployment guides
Azure Well-Architected Framework	Microsoft's 5-pillar framework with Azure Advisor integration
Azure Architecture Center	Reference architectures, design patterns, anti-patterns
GitHub Well-Architected	GitHub's reliability, security, and governance library

Resource	What it is
AWS Control Tower	Managed landing zone service — account factory, guardrails, dashboard
Account Factory for Terraform (AFT)	IaC-driven account vending on top of Control Tower
AWS Landing Zone Accelerator	Opinionated, compliance-ready landing zone for regulated industries
GCP Cloud Foundation Toolkit	Terraform blueprints for GCP landing zones
GCP Assured Workloads	Compliance controls for regulated GCP workloads
Azure Landing Zones	Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework landing zones
Terraform Landing Zones	Azure landing zones in Terraform

Resource	What it is
System Design Primer	donnemartin's comprehensive system design guide — the most-starred resource on GitHub for this topic
Awesome System Design	Curated list of system design resources, papers, case studies
High Scalability Blog	Real architecture case studies — how companies actually scaled
Martin Fowler's Architecture Guide	Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, microservices, DDD
The Architecture of Open Source Applications	Deep dives into how real systems (nginx, git, LLVM) are structured

Resource	What it is
AWS WAF — Cell-Based Architecture	AWS Well-Architected guidance on cell-based fault isolation
AWS Builders' Library — Reliability and Constant Work	How Amazon uses constant-work patterns and cell isolation in production
Netflix Tech Blog — Chaos Engineering	Netflix's approach to failure injection and resilience
Chaos Engineering (book)	O'Reilly book — principled approach to system resilience
awesome-chaos-engineering	Curated chaos engineering tools, books, papers, and game days
resilience4j	Circuit breaker, retry, rate limiter library for JVM
Hystrix (Netflix)	Circuit breaker library (now in maintenance mode — use resilience4j)

Resource	What it is
AWS IAM Access Analyzer	Detects overly permissive policies and public access
AWS IAM Policy Simulator	Test IAM policies before deploying
GCP Policy Analyzer	Understand what a principal can access before granting
Open Policy Agent (OPA)	Policy-as-code engine — enforce least privilege in CI/CD
HashiCorp Vault	Dynamic secrets, just-in-time access, PKI, secret leasing
Checkov	Static analysis for IaC — catches overly permissive policies in Terraform before apply

Resource	What it is
awesome-scalability	Curated scalability patterns from real companies
Designing Data-Intensive Applications	Martin Kleppmann — the essential book on scalable data systems
USE Method	Brendan Gregg's Utilization/Saturation/Errors framework for performance
Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know	Interactive version of the classic table

Resource	What it is
AWS Solutions Library	Pre-built, vetted AWS architectures for common use cases
GCP Solutions Architecture	GCP reference architectures by industry and use case
Azure Architecture Icons	Official icons for drawing Azure architecture diagrams
draw.io / diagrams.net	Free diagramming tool with cloud provider icon sets
Excalidraw	Quick hand-drawn style diagrams — great for architecture sketches