awesome-fenix

This repository is an open-source book and reference guide on how to design and build large, reliable distributed software systems. The author, a software architect with experience on enterprise-scale systems, wrote it as a way to organize their own knowledge while making that knowledge available to other developers. The full text is published online at icyfenix.cn and covers a wide map of modern software architecture concepts.

The content is structured as a series of articles that walk through different architectural approaches: starting with a simple single-application design and then expanding into microservices, container-based infrastructure, service mesh patterns, and serverless deployments. Rather than being purely theoretical, the guide is paired with a set of companion code repositories that each implement the same sample bookstore application using a different architectural style. A reader can compare, for example, a Spring Boot monolith against a Kubernetes-hosted microservices version of the exact same product.

Readers who want to use the documentation offline can clone the repository, install its dependencies, and run a local VuePress site. There is also a command to export the entire document as a single PDF file, though the author notes that compilation takes roughly 25 minutes on a typical machine. The companion code projects are published as Docker images, so someone who only wants to see a running demo can skip building from source entirely.

The code in the repository is released under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows free use and modification including for commercial purposes, as long as attribution is kept. The written content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which allows sharing and adaptation for non-commercial purposes with attribution. The project is primarily written in Chinese, so non-Chinese readers will find the companion code more immediately accessible than the documentation text.