Architecture decisions are never purely technical. Every choice has tradeoffs — operational complexity, team bandwidth, business timelines.
Systems thinking applied to real problems — cloud migrations, monolith decomposition, performance investigations, and the trade-offs behind each architectural choice.
A monolithic worker processing six event-driven workloads behind a single in-memory busy flag couldn't scale horizontally, couldn't deploy independently, and was hiding a race condition on its most critical data collection. Using a phased Strangler Fig migration, we decomposed it into five independent modern .NET Worker Services — sequenced by risk, validated by shadow runs, and delivered without a single outage.