Platform team · knowledge base

Decisions, open questions and terms

What we decided, why, and what is still undecided. Decisions are separated from open questions on purpose.

Updated 11 Sep 2026
7 decisions · 3 open
Owner: platform team
  1. Engineering
  2. Platform
  3. Decisions

We standardise on Postgres for new services

Decided 14 Mar 2026 · R. Vance

New services use Postgres unless they have a documented reason not to. Existing MySQL services are not migrated on this basis alone.

The deciding factor was operational familiarity, not a technical benchmark. Both would have worked.
What we considered and rejected

MySQL (status quo, but two dialects to operate), DynamoDB (cheap at scale, but our access patterns are relational), CockroachDB (solves a distribution problem we do not have).

Event bus stays on managed Kafka until 2028

Decided 02 Jun 2026 · L. Ferrero

The self-hosted alternative saves roughly €90k a year and costs approximately 0.4 FTE to operate. At current headcount that trade is not worth making.

Revisit if the team grows past twelve engineers, or if managed pricing rises more than 20%.

Services are named after what they do, not after gods

Decided 19 Jun 2026 · team

billing-api, not hermes. A new joiner should be able to read an architecture diagram without a glossary.

Who owns the legacy SFTP contract?

Open — blocking raised 28 Aug 2026

The file gateway migration cannot start without an owner for the supplier contract. This is currently blocking one wave 2 workload.

Next step: raised with procurement 05 Sep, no reply yet.

What is the retention policy for cold archive?

Open raised 01 Sep 2026

Legal have not confirmed whether the seven-year rule applies to derived data or only to source records. The answer changes the storage tier and roughly €14k a year.

Should on-call cover the migration window?

Open raised 08 Sep 2026

Undecided. The team is split; no decision is needed before 1 November.

Terms

Reference

Wave
A batch of workloads migrated together, sharing a cut-off date.
Cut-off
The date after which a wave's workloads must run on the new platform.
Derived data
Anything computed from source records — aggregates, indexes, caches. Whether retention applies to it is currently an open question.