Introduction
Designing a backend that is resilient, maintainable, and scalable is never easy. As systems grow, error handling, process orchestration, and code quality often start to slip. This series of blog posts explores how we can structure a backend that follows proven principles and best practices—so that our architecture remains sustainable while still meeting the demands of real-world applications.
There may never be a truly perfect backend, but we can define an approach that gets us much closer to it.
Blueprint: What We’re Aiming For
The architecture we’ll explore is based on a few key principles:
- Framework-agnostic design – The structure should not be tied to a single framework or technology.
- Process-oriented system – The application is modeled as a series of processes, where each process is broken down into discrete steps.
- Step-level reliability – Every step is logged, has its own error recovery strategy, and reports errors in a consistent way.
- Commands vs. queries – Steps are categorized as either commands (changing state) or queries (reading state), following the CQRS principle.
- Service boundaries – Whenever a step requires external functionality, it invokes a dedicated service, ensuring clear separation of concerns.
Additional Capabilities
To extend this foundation, the system can support:
- Dynamic steps – Steps can be defined at runtime using a scripting language (e.g., Lua), allowing flexible workflows without redeploying code.
- Scalable deployment – The entire system can be containerized, or even structured as serverless functions orchestrated by a master node—similar in spirit to how Kubernetes manages workloads.
What’s Next
In the upcoming posts of this series, we’ll dive deeper into how to bring this blueprint to life. Some of the topics we’ll cover include:
- Designing processes and steps – how to break your system down into clear, testable units.
- Error handling strategies – ensuring every step can recover gracefully and log failures consistently.
- Command and query separation – applying CQRS to keep state changes and data reads cleanly separated.
- Integrating services – structuring external dependencies without coupling them tightly to the core system.
- Scaling the architecture – exploring containerization, serverless functions, and orchestration patterns.
Final Thoughts
Building a backend that balances flexibility, reliability, and simplicity is challenging—but not impossible. By treating systems as processes composed of well-defined steps, and by giving each step its own resilience and logging, we can achieve a sustainable structure that evolves with our needs.
This journey isn’t about chasing perfection—it’s about creating backends that are robust, maintainable, and future-ready.
If you wish to collaborate please send me an email my email