BIRCH System Architecture
This page documents the verified production architecture for the BIRCH backend as of the agent document API rollout.
Verified production components
| Component | Value |
|---|---|
| Public hostname | birchbackend.ihrailsoftware.com |
| AWS account | 018772930825 |
| AWS region | us-east-2 |
| Load balancer | birchbackend-lb |
| Target group | birchbackend-tg |
| Current healthy target | i-00f8b6f49c1e4edac:5056 |
| Current production container | birch_backend_candidate |
| Production image | 018772930825.dkr.ecr.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/birch_backend:latest |
| Rollback container | birch_backend on port 5055 |
Important architecture lessons
- Public DNS resolves to ALB IPs, not EC2 instance IPs.
- ALB target group health is the source of truth for live traffic.
- EC2
running, SSMOnline, and ALB targethealthyare different states. - The previous production container used Docker Hub while the new build pipeline pushes to ECR.
- Blue/green-style candidate deployment is safer than replacing the live container in place.