It keeps the systems easy to understand and reduces complex component interactions that can cause debugging nightmares.” — The Practice of System and Network Administration In every infrastructure codebase I maintain, there’s a directory called docs/adr. It’s where I keep the architectural decision records (and regrets) that have accumulated over the years.
The topics range from VPC CIDR allocations and tagging conventions to tooling choices and implementation details. The other day, I found myself renaming every file in that directory so I could make room for a new first ADR. In this post, I want to talk about the foundations of our work as infrastructure engineers and what lives inside that document.
