⚠️ Note 2023-01-21
Some things have changed since I originally wrote this in 2016. I have updated a few minor details, and the advice is still broadly the same, but there are some new Cloudflare features you can (and should) take advantage of. In particular, pay attention to Trevor Stevens' comment here from 22 January 2022, and Matt Stenson's useful caching advice. In addition, Backblaze, with whom Cloudflare are a Bandwidth Alliance partner, have published their own guide detailing how to use Cloudflare's Web Workers to cache content from B2 private buckets. That is worth reading,
Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs
- Clarify and agree on the scope of the system
- User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
- Who is going to use it?
- How are they going to use it?