Architecture Decisions & Explainability
How Avylo captures, evaluates, and documents material architecture choices with complete traceability and trade-off analysis.
Architecture Decisions & Explainability
An Architecture Decision in Avylo is not merely a record of what was chosen—it is a comprehensive, explainable rationale connecting requirements, trade-offs, evaluated alternatives, and downstream consequences.
Architecture Decision Detail View
Full decision record displaying context, recommendation, alternative comparison table, evidence citations, and creator acceptance state.
Anatomy of an Architecture Decision Record
Each Architecture Decision in Avylo contains:
1. Title & Status
A concise descriptor (e.g., “AD-004: Primary Relational Storage & Multi-Tenancy Isolation Strategy”) and current lifecycle state (Proposed, Accepted, Superseded, or Rejected).
2. Context & Driver
The specific business context, capabilities, and requirements that triggered this decision.
3. Primary Recommendation
The AI Architect’s proposed solution (e.g., “PostgreSQL with Row-Level Security (RLS) for tenant data isolation”).
4. Evaluated Alternatives
A structured breakdown of alternatives that were seriously considered (e.g., Separate Database per Tenant, Schema-per-Tenant, DynamoDB Multi-Tenant Table), explaining why each alternative fell short for this project’s specific constraints.
5. Trade-off Matrix
Comparative evaluation across operational dimensions:
- Complexity: Maintenance and deployment burden.
- Cost: Infrastructure spend at current vs. 10x scale.
- Latency / Performance: Throughput and response times.
- Team Velocity: Developer onboarding and tooling maturity.
6. Evidence & Grounding
Direct links to the Project Knowledge statements and requirements that substantiate the recommendation.
Graph-Grounded Explainability
One of Avylo’s core capabilities is instant explainability.
When inspecting any node in your architecture model, you can click Why? to inspect the full chain of evidence:
Evidence (Project Knowledge statement)
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Requirement (Sub-100ms analytics response)
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Capability (Real-Time Ingestion)
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Architecture Decision (ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL)
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Architecture Element (ClickHouse Analytical Node)No Hallucinated Explanations
The AI Architect does not invent generic answers on the fly. All explainability responses are strictly grounded in your project's versioned architecture knowledge graph.