These early architecture choices will come back to haunt you. 👻
Decision #1: "Let's Use NoSQL for Everything" 🔥 The Problem: No foreign keys, no transactions, data consistency nightmares 📈 At Scale: Customer data corruption, impossible reporting, audit failures ✅ Better: PostgreSQL for core business data, NoSQL for specific use cases
Decision #2: "Microservices from Day 1" 🔥 The Problem: Distributed monoliths, network complexity, debugging hell 📈 At Scale: Deploy takes 2 hours, finding bugs requires PhD in distributed systems ✅ Better: Start with modular monolith, extract services when teams split
Decision #3: "We'll Figure Out Monitoring Later" 🔥 The Problem: No visibility into system behavior 📈 At Scale: Outages last hours, root cause analysis is impossible ✅ Better: Logging, metrics, and tracing from day 1
Decision #4: "Let's Build Our Own [Authentication/Queue/Cache]" 🔥 The Problem: Reinventing solved problems 📈 At Scale: Security vulnerabilities, maintenance burden, opportunity cost ✅ Better: Use battle-tested solutions (Auth0, Redis, RabbitMQ)
Decision #5: "We Don't Need Tests in Early Stage" 🔥 The Problem: Fear of changing anything 📈 At Scale: Regression bugs, developer productivity plummets ✅ Better: Test critical business logic from the start
Decision #6: "One Giant Database Table" 🔥 The Problem: No data modeling, everything in JSON columns 📈 At Scale: Query performance dies, data migrations become impossible ✅ Better: Proper normalization, thoughtful schema design
The Architecture Success Framework:
🎯 Start Simple • Monolith > Microservices • SQL > NoSQL (usually) • Buy > Build • Convention > Configuration
📊 Plan for Scale • Monitor everything • Design for failure • Cache strategically • Plan data migrations
🔄 Evolve Gradually • Refactor in small steps • Extract services when team splits • Migrate data incrementally • A/B test architecture changes
The Golden Rule: Optimize for change, not for performance. Performance problems are easier to fix than architecture problems.
Remember: Your first architecture won't be your last. Build for the next 2x growth, not the next 10x.
What's your biggest architecture regret? 🤔