Tag Backend Engineering

When Our APIs Became the Architecture

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…

When Every Service Wanted Its Own Database

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…

When One Transaction Became Five Services

The transaction used to be simple. At least, it looked simple from the application’s perspective. A customer placed an order. The system processed the payment. The order was created. Inventory was reserved. The ledger was updated. The customer received a…

When Events Became the Backbone of the System

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.…

When a Database Became the Hidden Bottleneck

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…