The Computing Series

The 5 Diagram Types

# Diagram The question it answers
D1 Request Flow What is the path of a request? What is the latency at each hop?
D2 Data Storage Where is all the data? What is the consistency model for each store?
D3 Event-Driven / Async Coupling What are the asynchronous dependencies and their delivery guarantees?
D4 Data Pipeline How does data flow from raw events to queryable results? What is the freshness?
D5 Distributed Coordination Where does the system require multiple nodes to agree? What happens during a partition?

Each diagram type reveals one failure surface that the others cannot show. Draw all five; gaps in the diagrams are gaps in the design.


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