Teaching with living systems
The analogy dictionary
A quick reference to translate between the living-systems language and standard software architecture terms.
The body (one microservice)
| Human idea | Software meaning | AWS example |
|---|---|---|
| Human / body | A microservice | A CDK construct with functions, table, queues |
| Body parts | Modules within the service | handlers/, domain/, repository/, adapters/ |
| Senses | Inputs / input adapters | API Gateway routes, SQS, EventBridge rules, S3 events, schedules |
| Skin | Contract and validation | JSON schemas, request validation |
| Brain | Domain / business logic | Pure functions inside Lambda code |
| Memory (long-term) | The service's own database | DynamoDB table, S3 bucket |
| Short-term memory | Cache | ElastiCache, DAX, in-memory |
| Forgetting | Data expiry and retention | DynamoDB TTL, S3 lifecycle |
| Voice | Responses and published events | API responses, PutEvents |
| Ears for others | Event subscriptions | EventBridge rules → SQS |
| Hands | Outbound integrations | HTTP clients, AWS SDK calls |
| Immune system | Security | IAM, Cognito, WAF, KMS, validation |
| ID card | Service identity | Lambda execution role |
| Heart / pulse | Health metrics | CloudWatch metrics |
| Diary | Logs | CloudWatch Logs |
| Following a thought | Distributed tracing | AWS X-Ray |
| Pain | Alarms | CloudWatch Alarms |
| DNA | Infrastructure as code | AWS CDK → CloudFormation |
| Birth | Deployment | cdk deploy, CI/CD pipeline |
| Check-up | Testing | Unit tests, CDK assertions, integration tests |
| Cold start | First invocation delay of a new copy | Lambda cold start |
| Warm and ready | Pre-initialised capacity | Provisioned concurrency |
The society (the application)
| Human idea | Software meaning | AWS example |
|---|---|---|
| Society / ecosystem | The complete application | All services + platform |
| One job per person | Bounded context / single responsibility | One service per business capability |
| Senses of the society | User interface | Web/mobile app on S3 + CloudFront, Amplify |
| City gate / reception | API gateway / edge | API Gateway, CloudFront |
| Talking face to face | Synchronous request/response | HTTP calls |
| Writing a letter | Asynchronous message (command) | SQS |
| Personal inbox | A service's queue | SQS queue per service |
| Problem-letters box | Dead-letter queue | SQS DLQ |
| Town notice board | Event bus (publish/subscribe) | EventBridge |
| Loudspeaker | Fan-out notifications | SNS |
| Announcement | Event (a fact in the past) | OrderPlaced |
| Request to do something | Command | "Cook order 42" |
| Dancers who know the routine | Choreography | Events + rules |
| Manager | Orchestration | Step Functions |
| Apologising and making it right | Saga with compensation | Refund after failed step |
| Hearing the same thing twice calmly | Idempotency | Conditional writes, idempotency keys |
| ID office | Identity provider | Cognito |
| Laws | Guardrails and policies | SCPs, IAM policies, accounts |
| History books | Analytics / data lake | Firehose → S3 → Athena |
| The world | Cloud provider | AWS |
| Housing | Servers | EC2 (avoided in serverless) |
Lifestyles (system types)
| Lifestyle | Software meaning |
|---|---|
| 🏃 Rat race | High-throughput, spiky, latency-critical systems |
| 🧘 Living in peace | Steady, balanced business systems |
| 😎 Just chilling | Low-traffic, scale-to-zero systems |
| 🦉 Night owl | Batch / scheduled processing |
| 🎉 Party animal | Rare, predictable massive spikes |
| 🧘♂️ Monk | Modular monolith |
| 🏝️ Hermit | Isolated, highly regulated systems |
| 🌍 Nomad | Global, multi-Region systems |
| 👴 Elder | Legacy systems being modernised |
| Burnout | Cascading failure under overload |
| Waiting room | Queue / virtual waiting room |
| Setting boundaries | Throttling, reserved concurrency |
Written by Bipin Singh
Work with meSenior Full-Stack Engineer · AI & AWS. I design and build serverless systems on AWS — and love explaining them simply.