When a request vanishes into a maze of 10 microservices. How Distributed Tracing and OpenTelemetry keep you from going insane during an outage.

Why your event-driven system is lying to you. Solving the ‘Dual Write’ problem using the Transactional Outbox pattern.

Why distributed ACID is a trap. Understanding choreography and orchestration sagas for long-running business processes.

Storing events instead of current state. How event sourcing works, rebuilding state from events, and when the complexity is worth it.

Command Query Responsibility Segregation - why you might want separate models for reading and writing data. When it helps, when it’s overkill, and implementation patterns.

Comparing vertical scaling (scale up) and horizontal scaling (scale out). When to use each, trade-offs, and the complexity that comes with horizontal scaling.