10 Guides

Decision Guides

Structured comparisons for the most common architectural fork-in-the-road decisions — with criteria, scoring, and clear recommendations.

When to start with a monolith, when to decompose, and how to avoid the distributed monolith trap.

Choosing relational or non-relational storage — consistency, query patterns, and schema flexibility.

API protocol selection based on client types, performance, and team familiarity.

Request-response vs event-driven integration — coupling, reliability, and debugging trade-offs.

Framework for evaluating make vs buy decisions for platform capabilities.

PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Aurora — selecting the right relational database.

AWS, Azure, GCP, and multi-cloud — capability and commercial comparison.

Client, CDN, API gateway, and database caches — what to cache and for how long.

Choosing between blue/green, canary, rolling, and recreate deployment patterns.

Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS/SNS, and Pulsar — throughput, ordering, and delivery guarantees.

When command/query separation adds value vs when it adds unnecessary complexity.

Comparing the leading full-text search platforms on licensing, features, and ecosystem.

Architectural implications of choosing events over direct calls for system integration.

Deep comparison of the two dominant message brokers for event streaming and queuing.

Container orchestration vs function-as-a-service for different workload types.