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Ecosystem Principles

This document lists the principles every catalog candidate must honor. They are derived from ConnectSoft's existing architecture and SaaS framework and must not be contradicted by any item in the catalog.

Foundational Principles

  • Domain-Driven Design & Bounded Contexts. Capabilities are grouped into bounded contexts with explicit ownership, ubiquitous language, and contracts. Anchored to the SaaS framework DDD blueprint and Clean Architecture & DDD.
  • Clean Architecture. Domain at the center; infrastructure at the edges; dependencies point inward.
  • Modularization over fragmentation. Prefer modules inside a bounded-context service over standalone microservices. See Modularization and ADR-0011.
  • Cloud-Native. Containerized, Kubernetes-ready, horizontally scalable, configuration-driven. See Cloud-Native Mindset.
  • Multi-Tenancy & Edition-Awareness. Every serious candidate is tenant-aware and edition-aware by default.
  • Security & Compliance by Default. Least privilege, secrets management, encryption, and audit are not optional. See Security Overview.
  • Observability Everywhere. OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and structured logs. See Observability-Driven Design.
  • Event-Driven Integration. Cross-context communication is event-first (outbox + integration events). See Event-Driven Mindset.
  • API-First / Contract-First. Public surfaces are defined as contracts (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI) before implementation.
  • AI-Assisted Factory & Template-Driven Generation. Candidates are generated from factory templates and evolved by agents. See Factory Overview and the Microservice Template.
  • Azure-First but Portable. Default to Azure; avoid lock-in where reasonable.
  • Strong Platform / Horizontal / Vertical Separation. See platform vs horizontal vs vertical.

Consequences for the Catalog

  1. Reusable platform capabilities are built once and consumed by many products.
  2. Verticals compose platform + horizontal building blocks rather than re-implementing them.
  3. Each candidate's record captures tenancy, security, audit, and observability posture.
  4. The number of independently deployed services stays small and intentional.