Architecture Review: One Table Instead of Pinball

Anton Kosterin has observed Tinkoff's architectural transformations for almost ten years. As the audience grew, quality, reliability, and load readiness became explicit concerns. Geopolitical change added technology replacement and group-wide rules, prompting an architecture expert team.

The team reviews critical changes but should not become the sole decision point. Scale, risk, and cost filters are complemented by local review. A joint forum with infrastructure, security, and capacity specialists reduces repeated documentation and prevents contradictory demands.

At company scale, the process needs tooling. Documentation drifts from code, so the model should draw from existing sources: the developer platform, infrastructure, logs, metrics, and traces. A static view shows system composition; a dynamic view exposes real request paths and dependencies.

An RFC invites discussion before a decision; an ADR preserves context, choice, and consequences afterward. The record later explains why the team acted as it did. An architect remains an engineer who can code, design, work with constraints and stakeholders, and apply knowledge from adjacent fields.