Architecture Styles

Layered (N-Tier): The Style Nobody Chose

Controller, service, repository. The most-deployed architecture in the world, the least written about, and the rules that keep it from …

Ports and Adapters (Hexagonal)

One rule — dependencies point inward — and a test for whether you should be paying the indirection tax at all.

Microservices: The Itemised Bill

Whether to split is covered elsewhere. This is what the style demands as a package, and what you get if you pay only part of it.

Event-Driven: When the Broker Is the Backbone

Choreography scales in the writing and fails in the reading. What changes when the log becomes the centre of your system.

CQRS and Read Models

Separating reads from writes is a five-rung ladder. Most teams need rung two and start at rung five.

Serverless and Managed Services

You did not remove the operational burden, you traded it for a different one — IAM, limits, and a cost curve that inverts.

Per-User Instances Behind Capability Gateways

Cloudflare OS gives every user a private, sandboxed copy of each app and routes all outside access through per-service brokers. What that …

Data Platform Styles: Lakehouse and What Sits Around It

Six styles that are genuinely alternatives, two that are not alternatives to anything, and the one decision everybody forgets is two …

Three-Tier on AWS: The Reference Topology

The most-deployed cloud architecture there is. The security group chain is the real design, multi-AZ is a claim you have to test, and the …

Query-in-Place Logs: Firehose, Parquet, Athena

No index, so the partition layout is the index. The AWS standard combination for log analytics, and the freshness-versus-file-size trade at …