Middleware Patterns for Scalable Systems
Middleware Patterns for Scalable Systems Middleware patterns help teams scale systems by decoupling components, smoothing load, and reducing the impact of failures. The goal is to keep services responsive as traffic grows and problems arise. This guide highlights practical patterns that work with modern stacks: queues, backpressure, idempotency, circuit breakers, event-driven flows, and strong observability. Message queues and brokered patterns A message broker lets producers publish work without waiting for each task to finish. Workers pull work later, which absorbs bursts and improves resilience. Benefits include durable storage, replay capability, and built-in retries. Trade-offs include eventual consistency and the need for careful ordering. Tips: choose delivery semantics, design idempotent consumers, and use dead-letter queues for stubborn failures. Example: when a user signs up, publish a welcome event; downstream services handle emails and analytics. ...