Vol. I. 2026 · No. 1. February
BitstreamJournal

Reference Collection

Library

A curated reference collection for engineers who read beyond the documentation. The Library holds the research papers that changed how we build, the whitepapers that define best practice, canonical architecture diagrams for the patterns you encounter in production, and raw datasets for analysis and modelling.

Unlike the Archive — which is long-form editorial writing — the Library is a reference shelf. Come here to find, download, and study. Currently 11 resources.

Peer-reviewed work that moved the field.

Academic papers from institutions and conferences that have meaningfully advanced software engineering, systems design, and machine learning. Each entry is curated for practical relevance to working engineers, not just researchers.

The seminal 2017 Transformer paper that introduced the self-attention mechanism underpinning modern LLMs.

Vaswani et al.arXivJun 20172.2 MB
LLMsDeep LearningNLP

Microsoft Research paper demonstrating that 1-bit quantised LLMs match full-precision models at scale.

Ma et al.arXiv / Microsoft ResearchFeb 20241.8 MB
LLMsQuantisationAI Inference

The 2007 paper describing the design of Amazon Dynamo, foundational reading for distributed systems engineers.

DeCandia et al.Amazon / SOSP 2007Oct 2007340 KB
Distributed SystemsDatabasesEventual Consistency
View all research papers

Authoritative guidance from the organisations building the infrastructure.

Industry whitepapers from cloud providers, standards bodies, and major engineering organizations. These documents define best practices, architectural frameworks, and security standards that underpin production systems worldwide.

Google's comprehensive whitepaper covering reliability, security, performance, and cost optimisation on GCP.

Google CloudGoogleSep 20234.1 MB
GCPCloud ArchitectureSite Reliability

Amazon's six-pillar framework for building secure, performant, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Web ServicesAWSNov 20233.7 MB
AWSCloud ArchitectureSecurity Engineering

The NIST standard defining zero trust principles, components, and deployment models for modern security.

NISTNational Institute of Standards and TechnologyAug 20201.1 MB
Zero TrustSecurity EngineeringNetworking
View all whitepapers

Diagrams worth a thousand words — and a thousand decisions.

Annotated system diagrams for common and uncommon architectural patterns: microservices topologies, edge deployments, AI pipelines, data infrastructure, and more. Each diagram is designed to be a practical starting point, not an idealised abstraction.

Event-Driven Microservices — Reference Architecture

svg

A canonical reference diagram for event-driven microservices with a message broker, event store, and multiple consumers. Includes Kafka topology layers.

Bitstream JournalInternalFeb 2026
MicroservicesEvent-Driven ArchitectureKafka

Edge-First API Architecture

png

Reference topology for deploying API logic at the network edge using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, with origin fallback.

Bitstream JournalInternalFeb 2026
Edge ComputingServerlessCloudflare

RAG Pipeline — Production Architecture

svg

End-to-end reference architecture for a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system: ingest, embed, index, query, and rerank stages.

Bitstream JournalInternalFeb 2026
RAGLLMsVector Databases
View all reference architectures

Raw material for analysis, modelling, and experimentation.

Structured datasets compiled for data science, ML research, and benchmarking. Sources are documented, schemas are included, and files are versioned. Covers LLM benchmarks, cloud pricing, performance baselines, and more.

LLM Benchmark Results — Feb 2026

csv

Structured CSV of MMLU, HumanEval, and HellaSwag scores across 40 open-weight models, normalised for comparison.

Bitstream JournalInternal / AggregatedFeb 2026128 KB
LLMsMachine LearningAI Inference

Cloud Egress Cost Dataset — 2024

json

Per-region egress pricing data for AWS, GCP, and Azure, scraped quarterly. Useful for cost modelling.

Bitstream JournalInternal / AggregatedDec 202444 KB
AWSGCPAzure
View all data

Submissions welcome. Found a paper, diagram, or dataset that belongs here? Get in touch →