Anatomy of a Domain-Driven Platform

Every platform looks reasonable in a slide deck. Layers are labeled, arrows connect boxes, and the architecture appears clean. Then developers start building on it, and the truth emerges: capabilities that should compose don't, extension points that should exist are missing, and teams that should be autonomous find themselves filing tickets for basic operations. The gap between a platform that looks right and one that works right is structural, rooted in how the layers are composed, where the boundaries sit, and which decisions are pushed to teams vs. absorbed by the platform.