We originally introduced Kafka for a simple reason. We needed asynchronous communication. A service would publish an event. Another service would consume it. The producer didn’t need to wait. The consumer could process the event independently. It looked straightforward. Kafka…
At first, the API was just an interface. A way for one component to call another. Nothing more. Then the system grew. The monolith became multiple services. Teams became independent. Deployments became more frequent. And suddenly almost every important business…
One of the first principles we adopted after decomposing the system was simple: Every service should own its own data. It sounded right. The architecture became cleaner. Teams could deploy independently. Services no longer needed direct access to another service’s…
The system was becoming increasingly difficult to change. Every time we added a new capability, another service needed to know about it. A payment completed. The ledger needed to update. Notifications needed to be sent. Fraud analytics needed the transaction.…
The monolith had become difficult to work with. Deployments were getting larger. Teams were stepping on each other. Some parts of the system needed to scale independently. A small change in one area could require deploying the entire application. The…
The requirement sounded simple. We needed to add a new column to a production table. The table had more than a billion rows. The business couldn’t afford hours of downtime. And we couldn’t simply stop the application, modify the database,…
