Architecture Evaluation Framework

Current Technology Stack

Current technology stack: see references/technology-decisions.md

Evaluation Criteria

When evaluating any proposed technology addition or architecture change, score against these criteria:

1. Principle Alignment

Score each core principle (Strong/Weak/Neutral):

• Enterprise at Home: Does it reflect production-grade patterns?
• Everything as Code: Can it be fully represented in git?
• Automation is Key: Does it reduce or increase manual toil?
• Learning First: Does it teach valuable enterprise skills?
• DRY and Code Reuse: Does it leverage existing patterns or create duplication?

2. Stack Fit

• Does this overlap with existing tools? (e.g., adding Redis when Dragonfly exists)
• Does it integrate with the GitOps workflow? (Must be Flux-deployable)
• Does it work on bare-metal? (No cloud-only services)
• Does it support the multi-cluster model? (dev → integration → live)

3. Operational Cost

• How is it monitored? (Must integrate with kube-prometheus-stack)
• How is it backed up? (Must have a recovery story)
• How does it handle upgrades? (Must be declarative, ideally via Renovate)
• What's the failure blast radius? (Isolated > cluster-wide)

4. Complexity Budget

• Is the complexity justified by the learning value?
• Could a simpler existing tool solve the same problem?
• What's the maintenance burden over 12 months?

5. Alternative Analysis

• What existing stack components could solve this? (Always check first)
• What are the top 2-3 alternatives in the ecosystem?
• What do other production homelabs use? (kubesearch research)

6. Failure Modes

• What happens when this component is unavailable?
• How does it interact with network policies? (Default deny)
• What's the recovery procedure? (Must be documented in a runbook)
• Can it self-heal? (Strong preference for self-healing)

Anti-Patterns to Challenge

Anti-Pattern	Why It's Wrong	Correct Approach
"Just run a container" without monitoring	Invisible failures, no alerting	ServiceMonitor + PrometheusRule required
Adding a new tool when existing ones suffice	Stack bloat, maintenance burden	Evaluate existing stack first
Skipping observability "for now"	Technical debt that never gets paid	Monitoring is day-1, not day-2
Cloud-only services	Vendor lock-in, can't run on bare-metal	Self-hosted alternatives preferred
Single-instance without HA story	Single point of failure	At minimum, document recovery procedure