Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
Trade-off Analysis: Comparing Options Against Scenarios, Sensitivity and Trade-off Points
You compare options not with each other but against prioritized quality attribute scenarios, ideally with measurements from a spike; ATAM's sensitivity point, trade-off point and risk concepts show where the decision is fragile. We weigh no cache, HybridCache and Redis for the Bookstore catalog with a real spike: why p95 did not move, why an L2 did not fix stale prices and why a weighted decision matrix misleads.
The Cost of Microservices: When Are They Unnecessary and When Are They Inevitable?
Microservices are unnecessary for a single-team system without the prerequisites (automated provisioning, monitoring, fast deployment); they become inevitable once teams waiting on each other and parts that scale differently become measurable. The real cost of a network call, measured, plus the fallacies of distributed computing, Fowler's prerequisites, a correct reading of the Prime Video case and a decision checklist for Bookstore.
Trade-off Thinking: No Right Answer, Only the Least Worst Option
In architecture every option gains one characteristic at the expense of another; the job is to make the cost visible and accept it deliberately. In Bookstore, sending the order email synchronously ties checkout to SMTP and creates duplicate orders, while queuing it with Channel<T> brings checkout down to 1 ms but loses 3 emails when the process stops; one-way and two-way doors, the last responsible moment and writing down the why.
What Is Software Architecture? How It Differs from Design and What an Architect Does
Software architecture is the set of decisions that shape a system's important properties and are expensive to undo; between it and design there is no hard line but a spectrum from strategic to tactical. The SEI, ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 and Fowler/Johnson definitions, FoSA's three laws, the architect's role and the Bookstore example used across the category.