"Patterns are not rules. They're solutions to recurring problems, validated by experience."
Design patterns provide a shared vocabulary and proven solutions to common system design challenges.
They encode the wisdom of thousands of engineers who've solved similar problems. Use them as starting points, not rigid templates.
Each microservice owns its database. No shared databases between services.
Benefits: Independent deployment, technology choice, scaling
Trade-offs: Data consistency challenges, complex queries across services
Store state changes as immutable sequence of events rather than current state.
Benefits: Complete audit trail, time travel debugging, event replay
Trade-offs: Query complexity, storage overhead, eventual consistency
Prevent cascading failures by failing fast when dependencies are unhealthy.
Benefits: Improved resilience, faster failure detection, resource protection
Trade-offs: Added complexity, configuration tuning, potential false positives
Control request rates to prevent overload and ensure fair resource allocation.
Benefits: Prevents abuse, protects resources, ensures SLA compliance
Trade-offs: Legitimate users may be throttled, configuration complexity
Expose health endpoints for monitoring service status and dependencies.
Benefits: Automated health detection, load balancer integration, orchestration support
Trade-offs: Requires careful design to avoid false negatives
Deploy auxiliary functionality alongside main service in separate process/container.
Benefits: Language-agnostic, independent scaling, clear separation of concerns
Trade-offs: Resource overhead, inter-process communication latency
Don't apply patterns blindly. Understand the problem space and constraints first.
Real systems use multiple patterns together. Circuit breaker + retry + fallback.
Patterns are guidelines, not rules. Adapt them to your specific needs and constraints.