Cross-Cutting Architecture

Architecture capabilities and policies that apply consistently across multiple components, services, or bounded contexts.

Motivation

Cross-Cutting Architecture addresses concerns that cannot be owned by only one business feature or component.

Common concerns

Authentication and authorization.
Logging, metrics, tracing, and auditability.
Error handling and resilience.
Configuration and secret management.
Data protection and compliance.
Caching, rate limiting, and request correlation.

Implementation approaches

Teams may implement these concerns through shared libraries, middleware, sidecars, service meshes, platform capabilities, policies, templates, and automated guardrails.

Common mistakes

Copying cross-cutting logic into every service.
Creating a central framework that blocks independent delivery.
Applying one policy without allowing context-specific exceptions.