Architecture

I stood there for a solid ten minutes, marker in hand, not knowing where to start. My team needed to track money movement. Not just record transactions—we needed to validate them, reconcile them, and prove they actually happened the way we said they did. And if we got it wrong? Well, that’s the kind of mistake that keeps people up at night. The thing about financial systems is that they seem simple until they’re not. A user sends money. You deduct from their account, add to someone else’s. Easy, right? But then you need to handle failed transfers, partial settlements, multi-currency conversions, and that 2 AM page when the numbers don’t add up. ...

In my previous post, I said: “CPU limits are about performance. Memory limits are about survival.” I stand by that statement, but I oversimplified what “survival” actually means depending on what kind of application you’re running. Let me break this down. Stateless Applications: The “Easy” Case When I wrote about memory limits being “about survival,” I was thinking primarily of stateless services. You know, the typical microservices: APIs, web servers, queue consumers. ...