Architecting microservices for security-critical applications involves handling real-time telemetry, compliance scans, and threat detection tasks.
High availability is crucial to prevent exposure or financial loss, with traceability being essential for audits and compliance.
Core design principles include avoiding synchronous chains between services and utilizing messaging systems for resilience.
Tenant isolation is key, requiring data to be isolated across various layers for multi-tenant platforms.
Zero trust between services is emphasized, employing mTLS, token-based authentication, and access controls for strong security boundaries.
Idempotency and replayability are important for security systems to ensure verifiable operations and audit trails.
Observability is critical, with structured logs, distributed tracing, and real-time metrics being foundational for operational maturity.
Successful usage metering framework for a SaaS security platform involved streaming billions of data points with a scalable, fault-tolerant architecture.
Common pitfalls to avoid include tight coupling between services, underestimating compliance overhead, ignoring failure modes, and building one-size-fits-all services.
Architecting for security-critical applications requires balancing scalability, compliance, and reliability while considering accountability, traceability, and trust.