Start with a Modular Monolith
Premature microservice decomposition introduces distributed system complexity before business boundaries are proven. Build a clean modular monolith first, and extract services only when team boundaries or specific scaling bottlenecks demand it.
Essential Platform Components
- Docker Multi-Stage Builds: Produce lean, distroless production container images containing zero unneeded dependencies or build tooling.
- Kubernetes Autoscaling: Implement Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA) paired with Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) to scale workers according to queue depth.
- BullMQ & RabbitMQ Asynchronous Queues: Offload resource-intensive tasks like PDF compilation and webhooks to background workers with Dead Letter Queues (DLQs).
- Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: Trace requests across services to detect latency regressions and error propagation paths instantly.