Maturity Levels
Every architecture post on this site is a bet. The maturity label says how much production evidence stands behind it — nothing about difficulty, quality, or how advanced the topic is.
It answers one question: what happens if you run this in production tomorrow?
| Level | What it means | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Opinion | Reasoned from first principles. No lab or production evidence yet. | A thinking tool — challenge the assumptions. |
| Field-tested | Validated outside production: benchmarks, staging, reproducible labs. | The mechanics hold; the operational unknowns have not surfaced yet. |
| Production-proven | Running in at least one real deployment, under real traffic. | Copy it, with awareness of the context it came from. |
| Battle-tested | Survived multiple environments, sustained scale, and failure over time. | Copy freely — the failure modes are known and handled. |
The scale is self-assigned and re-graded as evidence accumulates: a post that earns production scars moves up, and one whose assumptions collapse moves down.
If a post claims Production-proven and your production disagrees, that is a bug in the post, not in your infrastructure. Tell me — that is the most useful feedback there is.