Backend Monitoring Basics: Metrics, Logs, Traces and SLOs
Learn what metrics, logs and traces each answer, how to tie them together with trace IDs, and how to drive alerting from SLOs instead of raw signals.
13 min read
Archive
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305 published
Microservices to Monolith: When and How to Consolidate Services
Learn when moving from microservices to a monolith makes sense, how to merge services into a modular monolith incrementally, and what it costs.
14 min read
Backward Compatible API Changes: A Checklist for Service Owners
How to judge backward compatible API changes against real consumer behavior, classify breaking changes, apply tolerant readers, and run deprecation.
18 min read
Dockerfile Best Practices for Small, Fast, Secure Node.js and Java Images
Build small, fast, secure Node.js and Java images with multi-stage builds, cache-aware layer order, pinned minimal bases and a non-root user.
15 min read
Idempotency in Distributed Systems: Making Retries Safe
Learn how idempotency keys, durable dedup records and atomic state transitions make retries safe when exactly-once delivery is impossible.
14 min read
Cloud Cost Optimization for Small Teams: Cleanup Before Commitments
A practical order of operations for small backend teams: read the bill, remove idle resources, right-size from real utilization, then size reserved capacity.
13 min read
NestJS Microservices: Transports, Message Patterns and Hybrid Apps
Build NestJS microservices: pick a transport, design message contracts, use send() vs emit(), handle errors and retries, and run hybrid HTTP apps.
14 min read
Shared API Contracts in a Monorepo: Share the Schema, Not DTOs
Learn to share API contracts across monorepo services using OpenAPI as the source of truth, generated types, and CI checks that catch breaking changes.
13 min read
GraphQL vs REST: Trade-offs for Real Backend Projects
Compare GraphQL vs REST on data modeling, over-fetching, caching, N+1, security and versioning, with a decision framework for backend teams.
13 min read
Contract Testing for Microservices: A Consumer-Driven Guide
Learn how consumer-driven contract testing works, how to gate deployments on verification results, and when it can replace end-to-end integration tests.
12 min read
CI/CD Pipeline Design: Ordering Stages, Gates and Rollbacks
Learn to order CI/CD stages by cost, build gates with clear pass/fail criteria, and design tested rollbacks before your first production deploy.
13 min read
Software Project Cost Overrun: Why Late Rework Costs the Most
Why backend projects overrun: late-found rework, integration failures and unpriced scope creep, plus practices that shorten feedback loops and cut cost.
16 min read