Architectural Patterns

Patterns for organising services, data, and infrastructure at scale.

Topics

Event-driven architecture

Messaging, choreography vs orchestration, idempotency.

• When to choose events over synchronous APIs
• Saga patterns for distributed transactions

Service decomposition

Microservices, modular monoliths, bounded contexts.

• Modular monolith as a deliberate stepping stone
• Identifying bounded contexts in legacy systems

Multi-region and hybrid

Active-active, disaster recovery, latency, data sovereignty.

• Multi-region topology for Azure workloads
• Hybrid connectivity patterns (NZ context)

Resilience patterns

Circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries, backpressure.

• Designing fault isolation with bulkheads
• Retry storms and how to prevent them

Data architecture

CQRS, event sourcing, cache strategies.

• Read/write separation without over-engineering
• Cache invalidation in distributed systems

Integration patterns

API gateways, BFF, webhooks, ETL vs streaming.

• API gateway responsibilities in cloud-native systems
• When streaming beats batch