Architecture
System design decisions: event-driven AWS, APIs and gateways, payments, analytics tracking and replatforming.
Ingress, Istio Service Mesh and API Gateway Explained: What Each Does and When to Use It
Ingress controllers, service meshes and API gateways all sit in the path of your traffic, and their feature lists overlap enough to confuse anyone. This is a plain-English knowledge article on what each one is for, how they fit together, and when you actually need them.
EventBridge vs SNS: When to Use Which (and When to Use Both)
EventBridge and SNS both deliver a message to multiple subscribers, so teams often treat them as interchangeable. They aren't. One is a high-throughput notification pipe; the other is an event router with rules, schemas and third-party integrations. Here's how I choose.
EventBridge Pipes and Scheduler: Deleting the Glue Lambdas
Every serverless codebase accumulates small Lambdas whose only job is to move data from A to B or run something on a timer. EventBridge Pipes and EventBridge Scheduler replace most of them with configuration. Here's where each fits and what to watch.
Engineering Owns What Happened, GTM Owns Where It Goes: A Tracking Architecture That Scales
Most analytics problems aren't tool problems, they're ownership problems. Here's the principle I now use for front-end tracking, and the thin tracking module with adapters that makes it work today with GTM and tomorrow with Segment.
Platform Replatforming at Freddie's Flowers: The Decision Framework
Replatforming a production subscription e-commerce business without disrupting operations is one of the most complex engineering programmes a CTO can run. Here's the decision-making framework we used at Freddie's Flowers.
SCA, 3D Secure 2 and Recurring Payments: An Architect's Guide for Subscription Platforms
Strong Customer Authentication changed how subscription businesses take card payments. Here's how I think about 3D Secure 2, merchant-initiated transactions, exemptions and keeping PCI DSS scope small now that v4.0 is the only version in town.
Queue Everything: How SQS-Based Architecture Improved Our API Response Times
The most impactful architectural decision in our replatforming wasn't the language choice or infrastructure. It was systematically moving everything non-critical out of the synchronous request path and into SQS queues.
Build vs Buy for Subscription E-Commerce: A Detailed Cost Analysis
After running a rigorous build vs buy analysis for a subscription e-commerce platform, the numbers told a clear story. Here's the full framework, the cost breakdown, and why 'just use Shopify' is the wrong answer for complex subscription models.
The Monolith Tipping Point: 6 Signs Your Platform Needs More Than a Patch
Every monolith reaches a tipping point: the moment when the next patch costs more than it saves. I've run several platform reviews at this point. Here are the six signals that tell you incremental improvement is no longer the right answer.
Why API and Website Isolation Is Not Optional
In 2011, rebuilding TouchNote's architecture to support iOS, Android, and HP webOS taught me a lesson I've never forgotten: your website and your API must be independent systems. Here's why.