Given a product description, produce a quantified characterisation of the system’s demands: read and write QPS, storage volume, bandwidth, consistency requirements, and latency targets. From this characterisation, determine the architectural constraints that eliminate whole categories of solutions and narrow the design space to a tractable set of choices.
The challenge is that product requirements are stated in user terms (“users can post and read messages”) and must be translated into engineering terms (“1,200 write QPS, 120,000 read QPS, 180 TB storage over five years”) before any meaningful architecture work can begin.