Architecture & Systems Design

Client-server models, RESTful APIs, OOP/functional fundamentals, design patterns, and caching and scaling basics.

On the exams

How this domain is tested

The share of each exam, and what the domain covers at that level.

Client-server models, RESTful APIs, OOP/functional fundamentals, design patterns, and caching and scaling basics

Microservices, event-driven streaming, caching tiers, scalability trade-offs, and incremental legacy migration

Enterprise system topologies, legacy modernization, and domain-driven design

Enterprise capital asset lifecycles, portfolio tech stacks, and M&A audit

RAG topologies, vector search embeddings, semantic caching, and streaming APIs

Hybrid mesh architectures, cloud-agnostic abstractions, and resilient distributed storage

Modular architectures supporting independent squad deployability and feature toggling

Embedded memory layout, interrupts, RTOS concurrency, and low-power telemetry

Quantization formats, memory bandwidth calculations, KV-cache management, and latency

Carbon-aware design, asynchronous computation queues, and energy-minimalist caching

Go deeper

TPBOK Domain Guide 1 Architecture, free in the IICTP library.

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Blog post

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Blog post