Why the schema of what your system publishes is more architecturally significant than the framework it runs on, the database it uses, or the team that built it. There is a thought experiment worth doing before designing any distributed system. Imagine you need to replace one of your services completely.

Every pattern in this publication — event contracts, orchestration, choreography, domain boundaries, trust envelopes — ultimately applies to one thing. The capability. It is the unit of architecture in Relative Architecture. Understanding what a capability is, what it contains, and how it connects to everything around it is the foundation everything else

A single capability is a bounded unit of ownership. It processes commands, maintains its own state, publishes events, and reacts to facts from the outside world. Understanding what a capability is gets you halfway there. The other half is understanding how capabilities connect — how a single intent ripples through a