Begin with a well-structured monolith, keep it modular, and only split when concrete signals justify the added complexity; avoid a distributed monolith by enforcing clear boundaries and evolving incrementally.

Start with one large application and only fragment it when real signals demand it, to prevent premature complexity.

Be aware of hidden microservice costs: higher latency, lack of cross-service transactions, more complex CI/CD, heavier observability and on-call burdens, and increased cognitive load.

While microservices offer independent deployment, ownership, and fault isolation, they introduce costs like network latency, eventual consistency, and elevated CI/CD and monitoring requirements.

Do not rely on ACID distributed transactions; accept eventual consistency and coordinate across services with sagas or outbox patterns.

Further reading and author contact information are available on arnavsharma.dev.

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Prioritize practical domain-driven design and organizational considerations over chasing architectural trends.

Architecture exists on a spectrum: monolith, modular monolith, microservices, and distributed monolith—the last being a common pitfall to avoid.

Conway's Law suggests architecture should reflect organizational structure; align architecture with team size and composition.

Avoid splitting services by technical layers; instead partition by business capabilities such as orders, payments, and inventory.

Plan for failure from the start: implement timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and bulkheads to withstand partial failures.