Master the technical word combinations used in system design and architecture discussions in English. These collocations appear in design documents, architecture reviews, and engineering white papers.
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We need to ___ the single point of failure in the current architecture before we can guarantee 99.9% uptime.
We 'eliminate a single point of failure' in system design. 'Eliminate' is the precise technical verb meaning to remove completely: eliminate SPOF, eliminate risk, eliminate bottlenecks. 'Remove' is also correct. 'Fix a single point of failure' sounds odd because it implies patching rather than architectural change.
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The design doc proposed a distributed cache layer to ___ load on the primary database.
We 'offload load' or 'offload work' in system design. 'Offload' specifically means to shift processing responsibility to another component, which is the precise intent here. 'Reduce load on the database' is also very natural. 'Lower load' and 'decrease load' are grammatically correct but less idiomatic in architecture discussions.
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The architecture review board asked the team to ___ the trade-offs between consistency and availability before choosing an approach.
We 'weigh trade-offs' in decision-making and system design. 'Weigh' means to carefully consider competing factors: weigh trade-offs, weigh options, weigh pros and cons. It implies balanced evaluation. 'Analyse trade-offs' is also professional. 'Consider trade-offs' is more generic.
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The team chose an event-driven approach to ___ tight coupling between the microservices.
We 'avoid tight coupling' in system design. 'Avoid' is the natural verb when the goal is to prevent a negative architectural pattern from occurring. 'Reduce tight coupling' also works when some coupling already exists. 'Eliminate coupling' is used when refactoring an existing system.
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Before the design is approved, we must ___ that the system can ___ the expected peak traffic of 10,000 requests per second.
'Ensure' and 'handle' are the most natural collocations here. We 'ensure that a system handles load' — 'handle' is the standard verb for a system's ability to process traffic: handle requests, handle load, handle failures. 'Ensure' is preferred over 'confirm' (which implies it already works) or 'verify' (more formal/testing context).