Architecture

Update your database and publish an event atomically — without two-phase commit — by writing events to an outbox table first.

A well-structured modular monolith gives you clean boundaries and fast iteration without the operational tax of distribution.

Decoupling with events buys scalability and resilience, but you pay in eventual consistency, ordering bugs, and harder debugging.

You can't BEGIN..COMMIT across services. Sagas trade atomic transactions for choreographed steps and compensating actions.

A client retries a payment after a timeout and the customer gets billed twice. Idempotency keys make retries safe by design.

Microservices promise scale and autonomy, but the real bill arrives as operational tax, network failure modes, and cognitive load.