Dunderly HR System 19
An Azure-hosted HR system for Dunderly, a paper supplies company: employee records, salary-change approvals, vacation balances and a monthly payroll file for the legacy on-premises payment system.
Diagrams
Every diagram of the project in one place, each linking to the section that explains it.
Components, where they run and how a request moves through them.
- Architecture (animated)
Networks and subnets, protocols and ports, TLS points, DNS and the way in and out.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Technical Architecture
How data is collected, transformed, stored and served, end to end.
- Dunderly monthly payroll run (animated)
One important request, call by call, including retries and failure paths.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Technical Architecture
How people and services authenticate, and where authorization is decided.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Security and Privacy
Trust boundaries, entry points and the threats considered at each one.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Security and Privacy
Entities, relationships and ownership (ER diagram).
Not drawn yet; belongs in Data and Integration
Environments, clusters and hosts, and what is deployed where.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Infrastructure and Environments
From commit to production, with the gates and the rollback path.
- Dunderly CI/CD pipeline (animated)
How metrics, logs and traces flow, and how an alert reaches a person.
Not drawn yet; belongs in Operations and Observability
Detection, triage, mitigation and follow-up for a production incident.
- Dunderly support escalation (animated)
The main path a user takes, screen by screen.
Not drawn yet; belongs in User Experience and Design
- Dunderly salary change approval (animated)
- Dunderly document upload and malware scan (animated)
- Dunderly go-live cutover (animated)
Discover and Define
Why the project exists, who it serves and how success is measured.
What the system must do, how well it must do it, and what is in the first release.
Roadmap, MVP, milestones, budget and the rules for changing the plan.
Design
How users move through the product and what they see on every screen.
Components, technology choices, integrations, hosting and the decisions behind them.
- System context and component architecture
- Technology and framework selection
- API and integration architecture
- Data architecture and data models
- Identity and access architecture
- Hosting and deployment model
- Scalability and performance strategy
- Resilience and disaster recovery
- Architectural decision records
Threats, controls, secrets, privacy obligations and how incidents are handled.
Who owns the data, how it moves, how it is kept, and how it is migrated.
Build and Test
Repository, standards, local setup and the workflow every change goes through.
How the work is sliced into iterations and built, reviewed and documented.
The test strategy, from unit tests to user acceptance, and the data and environments it needs.
Every environment from dev to production, built as code and kept in step.
Ship
The pipeline from commit to production, with gates, versioning and rollback.
Readiness, runbooks, cutover and the decision to launch.
Run and Support
Monitoring, logs, traces, alerts and the targets the service is held to.
The documents, guides and training that let other people run and use the system.
Who supports it, to what standard, and how it is patched, upgraded and recovered.
Govern and Improve
Who decides, what must be audited, and the evidence that proves it.
Learning from users, incidents and costs, and planning the end of life.
Interview Prep
The project as you would discuss it in an interview, answered from architect, developer, DevOps and SRE perspectives, with links back to the playbook.
- Project Overview and Your Role (4)
- System Design and Architecture (5)
- Technology Choices (3)
- Frontend Architecture (4)
- Backend and API Design (4)
- Database and Data Modeling (4)
- Frontend, Backend and Database Communication (5)
- Integrations and Background Processing (3)
- Security and Identity (4)
- Performance and Scalability (3)
- Reliability and Resilience (3)
- Testing and Quality (3)
- Infrastructure and Environments (3)
- CI/CD and Deployment (4)
- Monitoring and Observability (3)
- Cost, Maintenance and Support (2)
- Leadership, Stakeholders and Governance (3)
- Lessons Learned and Trade-offs (4)