66 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
66 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Design Principles
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description: Architectural and operational design principles used to shape Den Vault content and the systems it describes
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tags:
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- about
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- design
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- architecture
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category: about
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created: 2026-03-14
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updated: 2026-03-14
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---
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# Design Principles
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## Summary
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Den Vault favors design principles that make systems easier to understand, operate, and recover. These principles apply to both the infrastructure being documented and the way documentation itself is structured.
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## Why it matters
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Without stable design principles, infrastructure turns into a collection of local optimizations that are difficult to audit and harder to maintain. Shared principles make it easier to evaluate tools, architecture choices, and documentation quality consistently.
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## Core concepts
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- Systems should be understandable by inspection
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- Keep it durable: back up, migrate, repair, and replace
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- Leave room for care in interfaces, naming, and operational ergonomics
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- Stay practical when choosing tradeoffs and tooling
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- Clear trust boundaries
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- Minimal exposed surface area
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- Declarative configuration where possible
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- Explicit ownership of data, identity, and ingress paths
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- Observability and recovery designed in from the start
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## Practical usage
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These principles usually lead to patterns such as:
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- Private administrative access through VPN or dedicated management networks
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- Reverse proxies and DNS as shared platform services
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- Container and VM workloads with documented persistence boundaries
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- Backup and restore strategy treated as a design requirement
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- Low-dependency site and service architecture when that improves long-term maintainability
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## Best practices
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- Prefer one clear pattern over multiple overlapping ones
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- Keep the path of a request or dependency easy to trace
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- Design around failure domains, not only nominal behavior
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- Make operational boundaries visible in diagrams, inventory, and docs
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- Treat usability and readability as part of technical quality
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## Pitfalls
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- Mixing management, storage, and user traffic without a reasoned boundary
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- Depending on defaults without documenting them
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- Building fragile chains of dependencies for simple services
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- Adding security controls that cannot be operated consistently
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- Making systems colder, more complex, or more abstract than the problem requires
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## References
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- [The Twelve-Factor App](https://12factor.net/)
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- [NGINX: Reverse Proxy](https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-proxy/)
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- [Prometheus overview](https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/)
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