Microservices Patterns: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right Architecture
Most teams don't fail at microservices because the pattern is wrong. They fail because they adopted all the patterns at once, before they understood which problems each one was actually solving.
I've watched teams ship a service mesh, an event bus, a saga orchestrator, and a CQRS read model in the same quarter — for a system that had fewer services and limited users. The result is what's now called a distributed monolith: all the operational complexity of microservices with none of the independent deployability or scalability.
This guide walks through the patterns that matter, what each one is actually for, and when not to use it. Code examples are in Python, with a decision matrix at the end so you can match the pattern to your problem.
Microservices vs. Distributed Monolith
