Engineering Tenets

The text discusses the technical challenges involved in building a usage-based metering and pricing system, focusing on key tenets such as high availability, reliability, scalability, and frugality. It provides guidelines for achieving these tenets, including using horizontally scalable services, setting up across multiple availability zones, configuring backups, automating testing, and minimizing costs through burstable instance types. The text also covers application-level aspects such as accuracy, developer friendliness, robustness, and flexibility, with guidelines for ensuring idempotency in event processing, designing for the long term, and providing native integrations with popular tools and frameworks. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of high performance, security, and observability, with recommendations for stress testing services, tracking system metrics, monitoring application performance, and using log aggregation systems. The text concludes by mentioning the trade-offs made in their previous venture and invites readers to share their experiences on implementing these tenets in their systems.