Software Architecture Roadmap

Data structures and algorithms: hash tables, queues, graphs, trees — the ideas that reappear as consistent hashing, message queues, dependency graphs and indexes.

What to know before the rest makes sense: TCP connections and their cost, HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 multiplexing, TLS termination, DNS and TTLs, status codes, headers that control caching (Cache-Control, ETag), timeouts at every hop, and why a timeout is indistinguishable from a partition.

REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, SSE and webhooks: what each solves, how each fails, and which to expose to whom.

• API Architecture: REST, GraphQL, RPC, gRPC, WebSockets, WebhooksNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

What architecture is, how a system evolves one problem at a time, monolith and modular monolith, and the code-level structures — layered, clean, hexagonal — that keep dependencies pointing the right way.

• What Is Software Architecture?Not startedLearningPracticingMastered
• From a Simple App to a Scaled SystemNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Monolithic ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Modular MonolithNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Layered ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Clean ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Hexagonal Architecture (Ports & Adapters)Not startedLearningPracticingMastered

Indexes, transactions, replication and partitioning: the database is the ceiling of most systems, and its behaviour drives the architecture around it.

Browser → CDN → application cache → Redis → database: TTLs, invalidation, stampedes, hot keys, and what belongs at the edge.

• Caching ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• CDN ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Point-to-point queues with acks, retries and dead letters, then Kafka-style logs with partitions, offsets and consumer groups.

• Message QueuesNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Kafka-Style Logs: Topics, Partitions, OffsetsNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Background jobs and workers, idempotency under retries, and backpressure when producers outrun consumers.

• Background Jobs and WorkersNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• IdempotencyNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• BackpressureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Vertical vs horizontal, why stateless services scale and stateful ones do not, and scaling a system step by step from one server to many.

• Horizontal vs Vertical ScalingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Stateless vs Stateful ServicesNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Scale This SystemNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Round robin, least connections and consistent hashing; health checks, sticky sessions, L4 vs L7, and the balancer as a single point of failure.

• Load BalancingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Partitions and CAP without slogans, consistent hashing, service discovery in a dynamic fleet, and why one transaction cannot span services.

• CAP and Distributed SystemsNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Consistent HashingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Service DiscoveryNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Distributed TransactionsNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Service boundaries, database ownership, partial failure and the API gateway — and the distributed monolith that results when the boundaries are not real.

• MicroservicesNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• API GatewayNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Event-driven architecture, the sync-vs-async decision, sagas with compensation, CQRS, and event sourcing — with duplicates, ordering and replay taken seriously.

• Event-Driven ArchitectureNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Request/Response vs Event-DrivenNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Saga PatternNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• CQRSNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Event SourcingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Timeouts, retries with budgets, circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting, and the arithmetic of nines and error budgets.

• Reliability PatternsNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Circuit BreakerNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Rate LimitingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Availability, SLOs and Error BudgetsNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Logs, metrics and traces for the same incident, and following one request across five hops to find where the time went.

• Logs, Metrics and TracesNot startedLearningPracticingMastered
• Distributed TracingNot startedLearningPracticingMastered

Put it together: URL shortener, chat, social feed, e-commerce, notifications, file storage — requirements in, an evolving architecture out.

Kill components and watch what breaks: the failure simulator turns every pattern above into an on-call decision.