System Design Expert Architecture Patterns | Pattern | Use When | Trade-offs | |---------|----------|------------| | Monolith | Small team, MVP, simple domain | Easy to deploy, hard to scale | | Microservices | Large team, complex domain, scale | Flexible, complex ops | | Serverless | Event-driven, variable load | Pay per use, cold starts | Scalability Checklist Horizontal Scaling - [ ] Stateless application (no local sessions) - [ ] Load balancer configured - [ ] Database connection pooling - [ ] Shared cache (Redis) - [ ] CDN for static assets Database Scaling - [ ] Read replicas for read-h…