# Technical Architecture

## Overview

Makenot.work is a monolith: a single deployable unit with clear internal boundaries, no microservices complexity.

## Stack

- **Language**: Rust
- **Framework**: Axum
- **Templates**: Askama (compile-time checked)
- **Database**: PostgreSQL
- **File Storage**: S3-compatible object storage
- **Frontend**: HTMX for dynamic interactions
- **Search**: PostgreSQL trigram similarity and substring matching (no Elasticsearch dependency)

## Core Components

```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 Caddy (HTTPS)                    │
└─────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                      │
┌─────────────────────▼───────────────────────────┐
│              Axum Application Server             │
│  ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────────┐  │
│  │  Page     │ │   API     │ │   Auth        │  │
│  │  Routes   │ │  Routes   │ │   Middleware  │  │
│  └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────────┘  │
└──────┬──────────────────────────────┬───────────┘
       │                              │
┌──────▼──────┐                ┌──────▼──────┐
│  PostgreSQL │                │  S3 Storage │
│  (sessions) │                │  (files)    │
└─────────────┘                └─────────────┘
```

## Data Flow

1. **Upload**: Client > API > Temp storage > Processing worker > S3 > Database record
2. **Playback**: Client > API > Signed URL generation > Direct S3 stream
3. **Payment**: Client > API > Payment processor webhook > Database > Payout queue

## Design Principles

- **No vendor lock-in**: All components have open-source alternatives
- **Horizontal scaling ready, single-server today**: The application is written so a load balancer can sit in front of multiple stateless app servers, but production currently runs as a single VPS. The load-balanced topology is on the roadmap, not in production. See [Infrastructure & Vendors](./infrastructure.md) for the current deployment.
- **Data locality**: Keep related data together, minimize cross-service calls
- **Fail gracefully**: If S3 is unavailable, streaming stops but the site stays up for browsing and purchases

## See Also

- [Infrastructure & Vendors](./infrastructure.md): specific providers we use
- [Open Source](./open-source.md): License and source availability
- [How We Work](../about/how-we-work.md): creator and fan workflows