Skip to content
Vivek Kumar SinghVivek Kumar Singh
Hire

Topic

Software Architecture & System Design

Architecture writing that assumes you have to ship the thing and then live with it. Microservices versus monoliths, cloud cost discipline, migration strategy, and the structural decisions that are expensive to reverse.

Much of this comes out of enterprise and defence work, where the constraints are real and the consequences of a bad boundary are measured in quarters rather than sprints.

21 articles by Vivek Kumar Singh

Data migration flow diagram with checklist items connecting legacy system to new CRM
Architecture

The Data Migration Checklist I Use on Every CRM Project

The exact checklist I run on every CRM migration — auditing, cleaning, mapping, test loads, and the cutover steps that prevent disasters.

· 8 min read

Architecture

Digital Transformation on an SME Budget: A Real Playbook

You do not need a seven-figure budget to transform an SME. A realistic, sequenced playbook for business automation that pays for itself as it goes.

· 7 min read

Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture With Kafka: When the Complexity Is Worth It

Event-driven architecture solves real problems and creates new ones. After shipping Kafka-based systems in production, here's my honest take: the use cases where it genuinely shines, the operational overhead nobody fully budgets for, and the simpler alternatives I now reach for first.

· 12 min read

Java

Java + React Full-Stack Architecture That Scales Without the Headaches

Java Spring Boot backend, React frontend, REST or GraphQL API layer, CI/CD, containerization — this is the full-stack architecture blueprint I've refined across 5 years of enterprise projects. Every decision explained, every trade-off acknowledged.

· 13 min read

Architecture

System Design Case Study: Scaling to 50,000 Requests Per Minute on AWS

A client's system was collapsing under load. This is the full engineering story: the bottleneck diagnosis, the architecture redesign using AWS ALB, ECS, ElastiCache, RDS read replicas, and SQS decoupling — and the load test results that confirmed it worked.

· 15 min read

Architecture

API Gateway Design Patterns Every Solution Architect Should Know

API Gateways are the front door to your entire backend. Get the design wrong and everything behind it suffers. Aggregation, rate limiting, authentication, circuit breaking, versioning — here are the patterns I apply on every enterprise API gateway design engagement.

· 11 min read

Java

Building Secure Java REST APIs: The Checklist I Use on Every Engagement

Input validation, JWT authentication, rate limiting, OWASP Top 10 mitigations, audit logging, SQL injection prevention — the security checklist I apply to every Java REST API I design or review. Not theoretical. Tested in enterprise production.

· 11 min read

Cloud

AWS Architecture Patterns That Cut My Client's Cloud Bill by 40%

Over-provisioned EC2 instances, missing auto-scaling, synchronous processing that should be async, S3 lifecycle rules not configured — cloud waste is embarrassingly predictable. Here are the architectural changes that cut costs by 40% on a mid-scale SaaS platform without touching application code.

· 11 min read

Java

Spring Boot Microservices in Production: My Checklist After 5 Shipped Services

Health checks, circuit breakers, distributed tracing, graceful shutdown, configuration management, secret rotation — the checklist I run before any Spring Boot microservice goes to production. Learned through shipped code, not tutorials.

· 10 min read

Architecture

Microservices vs Monolith in 2025: The Decision Framework I Actually Use

I've architected both. The real answer isn't 'start with a monolith and split later' — it's about team topology, deployment requirements, and domain complexity. Here's the exact decision framework I walk clients through as a Solution Architect, including when microservices are the wrong answer.

· 13 min read

Architecture

We Deployed With a Critical Bug — Here's Everything That Happened After

The bug affected payment flows. It hit production at 6 PM on a Friday. Here's the post-mortem: what we did, what we should have caught, and what permanently changed in our deployment process.

· 10 min read

Cloud

Environment Variables Almost Caused a Production Incident

The .env file was committed. Not to the public repo — to the shared internal one. By the time we caught it, three people had cloned it. Here's the exact sequence of what we did and what we changed permanently.

· 7 min read

Cloud

Vercel vs Self-Hosting — A Real Comparison After Doing Both

Vercel is magical until you hit a limit you didn't anticipate. Self-hosting is flexible until it's 3 AM and something is down and nobody is on-call. Both are right for different constraints. Here's how to decide.

· 8 min read

Architecture

The Monolith Was Right. Until It Wasn't. Here's Exactly When We Split.

Every architecture post says start with a monolith and split when needed. Nobody tells you how to recognize 'when needed.' We learned the hard way. Here are the three signals that made it undeniable.

· 8 min read

Java

Migrating .NET + Java to Next.js — Not What I Expected

Everyone warned me it would be a rewrite nightmare. They weren't entirely wrong. But the surprising part was what actually caused the most friction — and it had nothing to do with the code itself.

· 10 min read

Java

Java 8 Is Over a Decade Old and It's Running Everything in Production

Stream API. Lambdas. Optional. The Date/Time API. Java 8 was a genuine revolution that the Java community still hasn't fully absorbed. And yes, it's running in more production systems than you'd like to admit.

· 6 min read

Cloud

I Accidentally Burned Through My Firebase Free Tier in 4 Hours

I pushed a feature that made one Firestore read per keystroke in a live search field. No debounce. The function triggered on every character typed. By the time I noticed, I had 40,000 reads from exactly 3 users.

· 5 min read

Architecture

The GIGW Compliance Rabbit Hole I Was Not Prepared For

GIGW is a government web guideline in India that sounds straightforward. It is not. Two weeks in, I was rebuilding components from scratch and reading accessibility standards I'd never heard of.

· 8 min read

Cloud

Firebase vs AWS — I've Used Both Seriously. Here's the Real Answer.

The internet gives you hot takes: 'Firebase is a toy' or 'AWS is overkill.' Neither is true. The right answer depends on three questions I'll walk you through — and they have nothing to do with technical preference.

· 9 min read

Java

The Java Stream API Saved My Sanity on a Legacy Codebase

The codebase had for-loops inside for-loops inside for-loops. Some had comments like 'don't touch this.' The Stream API let me refactor safely, incrementally, without rewriting the entire universe.

· 7 min read

Architecture

Shipping Software for the Indian Army Changed How I Write Code

When software must run on Army intranet with no internet, strict GIGW compliance, and zero tolerance for downtime — your relationship with reliability and defensiveness in code changes permanently.

· 9 min read

Other topics

Zoho

22 articles

Generative AI

17 articles

Web Development

45 articles

VivekUI

20 articles

Consulting & Career

12 articles