---
ready: true
title: "The Architecture of Modern Web Applications"
description: "How to think about and build scalable, maintainable, and lasting systems in the age of microservices and cloud-native infrastructure."
date: "2026-04-10"
category: "Architecture"
tags:
  - "Architecture"
  - "Web"
  - "Scalability"
  - "Cloud"
readTime: "8 min"
summary:
  - "Good architecture starts with understanding the real constraints of the system, not by picking a technology."
  - "A monolith is often the best starting point; microservices are justified by organizational maturity, not project size."
  - "Scalability must be designed upfront: stateless services, event-driven decoupling, multi-level caching."
  - "Technical debt is inevitable, but it must be actively managed to avoid paralyzing the product in the medium term."
---

<div>
  <h2>Laying the right foundations</h2>

  Software architecture is the art of making structural decisions before writing the first line of code. A poor decision at this stage can cost months of refactoring later. Yet too many projects start without giving it the time it deserves.

  The first question to ask isn't "what technology should we use?" but "what are the real constraints of the system?" Data volume, update frequency, number of concurrent users, availability requirements — these parameters dictate technical choices long before the programming language comes into play.

  A well-architected system is not necessarily complex. Complexity is often a sign of a poor understanding of the problem, not a good solution. The goal is to achieve appropriate simplicity: robust enough to meet the needs, simple enough to remain maintainable.
</div>

<div>
  <h2>Monolith or microservices?</h2>

  This debate comes up endlessly. In reality, there is no universal answer — only different contexts.

  A well-structured monolith is often the best option for starting a product. It is simpler to develop, deploy, and debug. The boundaries between modules remain malleable as long as the functional scope is rapidly evolving. Microservices add significant operational complexity: managing network failures, distributed data consistency, and orchestrating deployments.

  The move to microservices is justified when distinct teams need to evolve independently, when certain components require different scaling strategies, or when security constraints impose strong isolation. It's not a question of project size, but of organizational maturity.

  Progressive migration remains the best approach: identify natural bounded contexts in the monolith, extract them one by one, and validate each split before moving on.
</div>

<div>
  <h2>Scalability: a property to design from the start</h2>

  Scalability cannot be added as an afterthought. It must be designed upfront, through data modeling choices, the way services communicate, and state management.

  A few guiding principles:

  **Stateless by default.** Stateless services are intrinsically easier to scale horizontally. State must be externalized to dedicated systems — databases, distributed cache, message queues — and not stored in process memory.

  **Event-driven decoupling.** Event-driven architectures reduce temporal coupling between services. A service publishes an event; consumers react at their own pace. This approach improves resilience and makes it easier to evolve components independently.

  **Multi-level caching.** CDN for static assets, application cache for frequently read data, query cache on the database side. Each cache layer reduces load on the downstream system and improves response times.
</div>

<div>
  <h2>Technical debt: the silent enemy</h2>

  Technical debt is inevitable. What is not inevitable is letting it accumulate without a repayment strategy. Every conscious simplification decision — a shortcut taken to meet a deadline — must be documented and scheduled for correction.

  Warning signs are often subtle: increasing onboarding time for new developers, multiplying regression bugs, a general feeling that "changing anything is risky." These signals typically precede crises by several months.

  Systematically allocating part of each sprint to technical health is not a luxury — it is a medium-term survival condition for any ambitious product.
</div>
