Three years ago, I inherited a distributed system that processed insurance claims across twelve microservices. The orchestration logic lived in a tangled web of message queues, retry handlers, and compensating transactions scattered across multiple codebases. When something failed—and in distributed systems, something always fails—debugging meant correlating logs across a dozen services while the business waited… Continue reading
Tag: Distributed Systems
The Patterns That Actually Matter: What Building Microservices at Scale Taught Me About Distributed Systems
The first time I decomposed a monolith into microservices, I made every mistake in the book. We ended up with a distributed monolith—all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. That painful experience taught me that microservices architecture isn’t about the services themselves; it’s about the patterns that make them work together. Microservices… Continue reading
Why Kafka Became the Backbone of Modern Data Architecture: Lessons from Building Event-Driven Systems at Scale
When LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka in 2011, few predicted it would become the de facto standard for real-time data streaming. Fourteen years later, Kafka processes trillions of messages daily across organizations of every size, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Having architected event-driven systems for over two decades, I’ve watched Kafka evolve from an interesting alternative… Continue reading
The Architecture Decision That Will Make or Break Your System: Monolith vs Microservices in 2025
The debate between monolithic and microservices architectures has evolved significantly over the past decade. What was once a straightforward “microservices are better” narrative has matured into a nuanced understanding that the right architecture depends entirely on context. After leading architecture decisions across dozens of enterprise systems, I’ve learned that the most expensive mistakes come not… Continue reading
Azure Service Bus: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Enterprise Messaging
In the landscape of enterprise application development, reliable messaging infrastructure often determines the difference between systems that gracefully handle load spikes and those that collapse under pressure. Azure Service Bus represents Microsoft’s fully managed enterprise message broker, offering capabilities that extend far beyond simple message queuing. After implementing Service Bus across numerous enterprise integrations, I’ve… Continue reading
Azure Cosmos DB: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Globally Distributed Databases
Throughout my career architecting distributed systems, few database decisions have proven as consequential as choosing the right globally distributed data platform. Azure Cosmos DB represents Microsoft’s answer to the challenge of building planet-scale applications—a fully managed NoSQL database service that delivers single-digit millisecond latency anywhere in the world. After implementing Cosmos DB across numerous enterprise… Continue reading