Architecture Patterns
Microservices, event-driven, CQRS, multi-region.
- Modules
- 11
- Hours
- 4
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- 5.0intermediate
Monolith vs Microservices: Team Topology, Conway's Law, and the Distributed System Tax
When a modular monolith beats microservices, how Conway's Law shapes architecture, and what the distributed system tax actually costs you.
- 5.1intermediate
Event-Driven Architecture: Notifications, State Transfer, and Choreography
The three flavors of events, how Kafka and event buses enable loose coupling, and when choreography beats orchestration.
- 5.2intermediate
CQRS: Separating Reads from Writes Without Losing Your Mind
Command Query Responsibility Segregation in practice: when to split read and write models, how to handle eventual consistency, and when CQRS is overkill.
- 5.3advanced
Event Sourcing: Events as the Source of Truth
Storing state as an append-only log of events, with replay, projections, snapshots, and the ops reality of running event-sourced systems.
- 5.4intermediate
Serverless: Functions, Cold Starts, and When FaaS Actually Saves Money
AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions in practice: cold starts, concurrency models, and the honest economics of serverless.
- 5.5intermediate
Backend for Frontend: Per-Client API Aggregation Done Right
When one API cannot serve web, mobile, and partner clients well, the BFF pattern gives each client its own aggregation layer.
- 5.6intermediate
Strangler Fig: Incremental Migration Without a Big Bang
Martin Fowler's strangler fig pattern for replacing legacy systems incrementally, with routing, facades, and how teams actually execute multi-year migrations.
- 5.7intermediate
Hexagonal and Clean Architecture: Keeping Business Logic Independent
Ports and adapters, clean architecture, and onion architecture: how to keep domain logic testable and framework-independent.
- 5.8advanced
Multi-Region Architecture: Active-Passive, Active-Active, and CRDTs
Designing systems that survive regional failure: DNS failover, active-passive replication, active-active with CRDTs, and Cloudflare's model.
- 5.9intermediate
Multi-Tenancy: Silo, Pool, and the SaaS Isolation Spectrum
Designing SaaS platforms that host many tenants on shared infrastructure: isolation levels, noisy-neighbor defenses, per-tenant metering, and when to graduate a whale.
- 5.10advanced
CRDT Applications (Yjs, Automerge, Local-First Software)
Design local-first collaborative software with CRDTs: Yjs, Automerge, peer-to-peer sync, and the architectural shift away from authoritative central servers.