Architecture Patterns

Proven structural solutions to recurring architectural problems. Patterns are not implementations — they’re descriptions of proven approaches with trade-off analysis.

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What’s Here

• architecture-patterns — Catalog of cloud-native architecture patterns

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Common Patterns Quick Reference

Pattern	What It Solves	Example
Strangler Fig	Incremental migration from legacy	Route traffic to new system piece by piece
Sidecar	Attach utilities to services without modifying them	Logging sidecar, metrics exporter
Circuit Breaker	Prevent cascading failures	Hystrix, Envoy circuit breaker
CQRS	Separate read and write models	Event-sourced systems
Event Sourcing	Store state changes as events	Audit trails, temporal queries
Saga	Distributed transactions without2PC	Choreography vs orchestration
Bulkhead	Isolate failures	Separate thread pools per dependency
Leader Election	Single-writer coordination	etcd, Zookeeper
Write-Ahead Log	Durability before acknowledgment	Kafka, PostgreSQL WAL

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When to Use Patterns

Patterns are starting points, not finished designs. Every pattern introduces trade-offs:

Strangler Fig:
  ✅ Incremental migration, low risk
  ✅ Old and new systems coexist
  ❌ Dual-running complexity
  ❌ Temporary twice the infrastructure cost

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Related

• thinking-like-an-architect — How to evaluate pattern trade-offs
• resilience — Implementation of resilience patterns
• README — System design interview patterns