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…
For 18 months, we built our own fraud detection system. The reasoning seemed sound. Fraud was important. Payments were core to the business. We had strong engineers. We had access to transaction data. And building the capability ourselves would give…
We had a system that looked healthy. Application CPU was reasonable. Memory was stable. The number of application instances had increased. The load balancer was distributing traffic normally. And yet response times kept getting worse. The first instinct was to…
We had a performance problem. One of the most frequently accessed pieces of data was being read far more often than it changed. The database was handling a large number of repeated reads. The obvious solution was caching. We introduced…
One of the most interesting architecture decisions I worked through was not about choosing between two technologies. It was about deciding how much architecture we actually needed. We had a large Java/Spring application that had been running for several years.…
