Network Architecture
VPC design, subnet segmentation, transit gateway, private link, and zero-trust network access.
Network Architecture is a core discipline within Infrastructure Architecture. It defines how technology systems should be designed, implemented, and governed to achieve reliable, secure, and maintainable outcomes that serve both technical teams and business stakeholders.
Applying Network Architecture standards reduces system failures, accelerates delivery, and provides the governance evidence required by enterprise clients, regulators like BSP, and certification bodies like ISO. Top technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) treat these standards as competitive differentiators, not compliance overhead.
📖 Detailed Explanation
Infrastructure architecture defines the platforms, networks, compute, and tooling that application workloads run on. CI/CD pipelines, monitoring infrastructure, security hardening, and network topology are infrastructure architecture concerns that directly affect system reliability.
Industry Context: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK) is the industry standard. GitOps with Flux or Argo CD for Kubernetes.
Relevance to Philippine Financial Services: Organizations operating under BSP supervision must demonstrate mature infrastructure architecture practices during technology examinations. The BSP Technology Supervision Group evaluates documentation quality, process maturity, and evidence of systematic practice — all of which are addressed by the standards in this section.
Alignment to Global Standards: The practices documented here are aligned to frameworks used by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the world's leading consulting firms (McKinsey Digital, Deloitte Technology, Accenture Technology). They represent the current industry consensus on best practices rather than any single vendor's approach.
Engineering Perspective: For engineers, Network Architecture provides concrete patterns and anti-patterns that prevent common mistakes and accelerate development by providing proven solutions to recurring problems. Rather than rediscovering what doesn't work, teams can apply battle-tested approaches with known trade-offs.
Architecture Perspective: For architects, Network Architecture provides the design vocabulary, decision frameworks, and governance artifacts needed to make and communicate complex technical decisions clearly and consistently.
Business Perspective: For business stakeholders, Network Architecture provides assurance that technology investments are aligned to industry standards, reducing the risk of expensive rework, regulatory findings, and system failures that impact customers and revenue.
📈 Architecture Diagram
flowchart LR
A["Network Architecture
Concept"] --> B["Principles
& Standards"]
B --> C["Design
Decisions"]
C --> D["Implementation
Patterns"]
D --> E["Governance
Checkpoints"]
E --> F["Validation
& Evidence"]
F -.->|"Feedback Loop"| A
style A fill:#1e293b,color:#f8fafc
style F fill:#052e16,color:#4ade80
Lifecycle of Network Architecture: from concept through principles, design decisions, implementation patterns, governance checkpoints, and validation — with feedback loops for continuous improvement.
🌎 Real-World Examples
HashiCorp's own infrastructure runs entirely on Terraform (their product) — the ultimate dogfooding reference. Their engineering blog documents how they manage 50,000+ Terraform resources across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Every infrastructure change goes through a pull request: `terraform plan` output is reviewed by a second engineer, then `terraform apply` runs in CI/CD. Zero manual changes to production infrastructure.
✓ Result: Zero infrastructure drift across 250,000+ managed resources; infrastructure changes reviewed like code — security issues caught before apply, not after
Shopify migrated to Kubernetes and ran their largest-ever traffic day (Black Friday) on it. Their 'Kubernetes on GKE' architecture auto-scales from 5,000 to 50,000 pods during peak traffic in < 5 minutes. Custom admission controllers enforce resource limits on every pod — preventing any single merchant's traffic spike from affecting the cluster. Their deployment pipeline runs 1,000+ deploys/day with zero manual approvals.
✓ Result: Black Friday 2023: auto-scaled to 50,000 pods in 4 minutes; zero manual infrastructure interventions during peak
Cloudflare Workers runs user code at 285+ edge locations globally — the infrastructure equivalent of Zero Trust for compute. Every Worker runs in a V8 isolate (not a VM or container), starting in < 1ms. Their infrastructure handles 50 million HTTP requests per second at the edge. Workers' CI/CD deploys to all 285 locations simultaneously in < 30 seconds.
✓ Result: 50M requests/second at the edge; < 1ms cold start; global deployment in < 30 seconds
Atlassian's SRE team published their Incident Management Handbook (open-sourced) and their internal infrastructure standards as their 'Engineering Handbook.' Every Atlassian service runs on AWS with mandatory chaos engineering tests using their 'Strangeworks' internal platform. Their shift from datacenter to AWS was a 2-year program that they documented publicly — now a reference for mid-size SaaS companies.
✓ Result: 99.99% availability for Jira and Confluence; incident MTTR reduced from 2.5 hours to 22 minutes after SRE practices adoption
🌟 Core Principles
Every aspect of network architecture must be deliberately designed, not discovered after deployment. Document design decisions as ADRs with explicit rationale.
Apply network architecture practices consistently across all systems. Inconsistent application creates governance blind spots and makes incident investigation unpredictable.
Network Architecture practices must demonstrably contribute to business outcomes: reduced downtime, faster delivery, lower operational cost, or improved compliance posture.
Quality of network architecture implementation must be measurable. Define specific metrics and collect evidence continuously — not only at audit or review time.
Standards for network architecture evolve as technology and threat landscapes change. Schedule quarterly reviews of applicable standards and update practices accordingly.
⚙️ Implementation Steps
Current State Assessment
Document the current state of network architecture practice: what is implemented, what is missing, what is inconsistent across teams. Use the governance/scorecards section for a structured assessment framework.
Gap Analysis Against Standards
Compare current state against the standards in this section and applicable frameworks (CNCF Cloud Native Landscape, SRE Book — Google). Prioritize gaps by business impact and remediation effort.
Design the Target State
Define the target network architecture state: which patterns will be adopted, which anti-patterns eliminated, which governance mechanisms introduced. Express as a time-bound roadmap.
Incremental Implementation
Implement network architecture improvements incrementally: pilot with one team or system, measure outcomes, refine the approach, then expand. Avoid big-bang transformations.
Validate and Iterate
Measure the impact of implemented changes against defined success criteria. Incorporate lessons learned into the practice standards. Contribute improvements back to this library.
✅ Governance Checkpoints
| Checkpoint | Owner | Gate Criteria | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current State Documented | Solution Architect | Network Architecture current state assessment completed and reviewed | Required |
| Gap Analysis Reviewed | Architecture Review Board | Gap analysis reviewed and prioritization approved | Required |
| Implementation Plan Approved | Enterprise Architect | Target state and roadmap approved by ARB | Required |
| Quality Metrics Defined | Solution Architect | Measurable success criteria defined for network architecture improvements | Required |
◈ Recommended Patterns
✦ Reference Architecture Adoption
Start from an established reference architecture for network architecture rather than designing from scratch. Adapt to organizational context rather than rebuilding proven foundations.
✦ Pattern Library Contribution
When your team solves a recurring network architecture problem with a novel approach, document it as a pattern for the library. This compounds organizational knowledge over time.
✦ Fitness Function Testing
Encode network architecture standards as automated architectural fitness functions — tests that run in CI/CD and fail builds when standards are violated. This makes governance continuous rather than periodic.
⛔ Anti-Patterns to Avoid
⛔ Standards Theater
Documenting network architecture standards in architecture policies that no one reads and no one enforces. Standards without automated validation or governance gates are not operational standards.
⛔ Copy-Paste Architecture
Adopting another organization's network architecture patterns wholesale without adapting to organizational context, team capability, or regulatory environment. Always adapt; never just copy.
🤖 AI Augmentation Extensions
LLM agents analyze design documents against network architecture standards, generating structured gap reports with cited evidence and suggested remediation approaches.
This section is optimized for vector ingestion into an AI-powered architecture assistant. Semantic search enables architects to retrieve relevant network architecture guidance through natural language queries.
🔗 Related Sections
📚 References & Further Reading
- CNCF Cloud Native Landscape↗ cncf.io
- SRE Book — Google↗ sre.google
- AWS Infrastructure Best Practices↗ docs.aws.amazon.com
- HashiCorp Terraform Best Practices↗ IEEE Xplore
- Documenting Software Architectures — Bass, Clements, Kazman↗ Amazon
- Building Evolutionary Architectures — Ford, Parsons, Kua↗ O'Reilly