Here's my template for describing the architecture of a system. The idea is to have people fill out this template and that then becomes the basis for a profile. This is how the Friends for Sale post was created and I think that turned out well. People always want more detail, but realistically you can only expect so much. The template is definitely too long, but it's more just a series of questions to jog people's memories and then they can answer whatever they think is important. What I want to ask is if you can think of any things to add/delete/change in the template? What do you want to know about the systems people are building? So if you have the time, please take a look and tell me what you think.

Getting to Know You

* What is the name of your system and where can we find out more about it? * What is your system is for? * Why did you decide to build this system? * How is your project financed? * What is your revenue model? * How do you market your product? * How long have you been working on it? * How big is your system? Try to give a feel for how much work your system does. * Number of unique visitors? * Number of monthly page views? * What is your in/out bandwidth usage? * How many documents, do you serve? How many images? How much data? * How fast are you growing? * What is your ratio of free to paying users? * What is your user churn? * How many accounts have been active in the past month?

How is your system architected?

* What is the architecture of your system? Talk about how your system works in as much detail as you feel comfortable with. * What particular design/architecture/implementation challenges does your system have? * What did you do to meet these challenges? * How does your system evolve to meet new scaling challenges? * Do you use any particularly cool technologies are algorithms? * What do you do that is unique and different that people could best learn from? * What lessons have you learned? * Why have you succeeded? * What do you wish you would have done differently? * What wouldn't you change? * How much up front design should you do? * How are you thinking of changing your architecture in the future?

How is your team setup?

* How many people are in your team? * Where are they located? * Who performs what roles? * Do you have a particular management philosophy? * If you have a distributed team how do you make that work? * What skillets does your team possess? * What is your development environment? * What is your development process? * Is there anything that you would do different or that you have found surprising?

What infrastructure do you use?

* Which languages do you use to develop your system? * How many servers do you have? * How is functionality allocated to the servers? * How are the servers provisioned? * What operating systems do you use? * Which web server do you use? * Which database do you use? * Do you use a reverse proxy? * Do you collocate, use a grid service, use a hosting service, etc? * What is your storage strategy? DAS/SAN/NAS/SCSI/SATA/etc/other? * How much capacity do you have? * How do you grow capacity? * Do you use a storage service? * Do you use storage virtualization? * How do you handle session management? * How is your database architected? Master/slave? Shard? Other? * How do you handle load balancing? * Which web framework/AJAX Library do you use? * Which real-time messaging frame works do you use? * Which distributed job management system do you use? * How do you handle ad serving? * Do you have a standard API to your website? If so, how do you implement it? * If you use a dynamic language which instruction caching product to use? * What is your object and content caching strategy? * What is your client side caching strategy? * Which third party services do you use to help build your system?

How do you manage your system?

* How do check global availability and simulate end-user performance? * How do you health check your server and networks? * How you do graph network and server statistics and trends? * How do you test your system? * How you analyze performance? * How do you handle security?

How do you handle customer support?

How do you decide what features to add/keep?

* Do you implement web analytics? * Do you do A/B testing? ! How is your data center setup? * How many data centers do you run in? * How is your system deployed in data centers? * Are your data centers active/active, active/passive? * How do you handle syncing between data centers and fail over and load balancing? * Which firewall product do you use? * Which DNS service do you use? * Which routers do you use? * Which switches do you use? * Which email system do you use? * How do you handle spam? * How do you handle virus checking of email and uploads? * How do you backup and restore your system? * How are software and hardware upgrades rolled out? * How do you handle major changes in database schemas on upgrades? * What is your fault tolerance and business continuity plan? * Do you have a separate operations team managing your website? * Do you use a content delivery network? If so, which one and what for? * How much do you pay monthly for your setup?

Miscellaneous

* Who do you admire? * Have you patterned your company/approach on someone else? * Are there any questions you would add/remove/change in this list?