Guides

This section collects the background an engineer needs before making a design decision, rather than procedures for any one product. It is deliberately vendor-neutral: the AWS-specific material lives under AWS, and the patterns we apply to our own services live under Software design.

Three clusters sit here. Networking covers the TCP/IP layering, HTTP versions and the behaviour of load balancers and reverse proxies — read those before choosing between a Layer 4 and a Layer 7 device. Security covers the encryption primitives (symmetric, asymmetric, hashing, signatures) and how application secrets are kept out of source control. Unix covers the parts of a Linux host that come up during deployment and debugging: the filesystem hierarchy, interface naming, and the firewall.

Pages here describe how something behaves, not how one of our stacks is configured. Anything that is true only of a specific service belongs in that service’s own documentation.