The eight fallacies are 30 years old.
They’re worse with LLMs.
Distributed system design consulting for teams building AI-native and cloud-native architectures where the non-functional requirements are the hard part.
The non-functionals are where systems fail
The feature works. It works under test. It works on a Tuesday morning when three people are using it. Then the whole company uses it on a Monday morning and latency goes from 200ms to eleven seconds, a downstream service that was never designed to be called that often starts returning 429s, and the architect who specified “high availability” in the requirements never defined what that meant in terms of money.
Non-functional requirements are the properties that determine whether a system is fit for the job once the feature set is no longer the question. Scalability, reliability, observability, security, performance, maintainability, and cost — the *ilities. They are consistently under-specified in requirements, consistently discovered in production, and consistently expensive to retrofit.
What we do
- Non-functional requirements specification. Turning “high availability” and “must be fast” into numbers the business will fund and engineering can build to.
- Distributed system architecture review. Where the fallacies will hit, where the coupling is hiding, and where a synchronous call is pretending to be resilient.
- Capacity modelling and performance engineering. Load profiles, bottleneck analysis, and cost models that show you what scale actually costs before you discover it on the invoice.
- Resilience design. Failure mode analysis, blast radius containment, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and graceful degradation — tested before the first incident, not documented after it.
- Observability architecture. Metrics, traces, logs, and SLOs that tell you what’s broken before the user does.
- Security architecture. Zero-trust design, identity boundaries, encryption strategy, and compliance controls wired into the platform rather than bolted onto it.
Tell us what’s stuck.
First conversation is a working session with an engineer, not a pitch.