Service page • Backend & Infrastructure • Microservices & serverless systems

Microservices & Serverless Systems: Building Modular and Scalable Backend Systems

Microservices & serverless systems are how SHAPE helps teams build modular and scalable backend systems—so you can ship faster, scale safely, and reduce the blast radius of change. We design clear service boundaries, event-driven integration, and reliable delivery practices that keep your platform maintainable as traffic, features, and teams grow.

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Table of contents

What SHAPE’s microservices & serverless systems service includes

SHAPE delivers microservices & serverless systems as a practical, production-first engagement. The objective is always the same: building modular and scalable backend systems that teams can evolve without constant rewrites, outages, or coordination bottlenecks.

What you get in a typical engagement

   
The win comes from disciplined boundaries and operational practices that make building modular and scalable backend systems sustainable.
 

Related services (internal links)

Microservices & serverless systems are strongest when APIs, cloud foundations, and data design align. SHAPE often pairs this service with:

Microservices best practices: the rules that prevent chaos

The fastest way to fail with microservices is to split a monolith into dozens of tightly coupled services. SHAPE applies microservices best practices that keep microservices & serverless systems aligned to outcomes: building modular and scalable backend systems with clear ownership, safe change, and predictable operations.

Start with business capabilities, not technical layers

Services should map to what the business does (billing, onboarding, fulfillment), not to technical layers (controllers, repositories). This keeps boundaries understandable and reduces cross-service churn.

Design for autonomy: one team, one service, one roadmap

Prefer async for decoupling; use sync for immediacy

In microservices & serverless systems, async messaging is often the easiest path to resilience. Use synchronous calls when you truly need immediate feedback (e.g., authentication checks), and async events for workflow progression and side effects.

Keep services small—but not microscopic

“Small” means cohesive and operable, not “as tiny as possible.” A good rule: a service should be easy to understand, test, deploy, and monitor without requiring deep knowledge of other services.

Standardize the boring parts (so teams can move faster)

   
if every service looks and behaves differently, you don’t have microservices—you have a collection of bespoke apps. Standardization is how building modular and scalable backend systems stays maintainable.
 

Architecture patterns for modular and scalable backend systems

There’s no single “right” architecture. The best setup depends on your domain complexity, team structure, and scaling needs. SHAPE designs microservices & serverless systems using proven patterns for building modular and scalable backend systems without unnecessary overhead.

API gateway + edge routing

An API gateway (or edge routing layer) helps centralize cross-cutting concerns:

Serverless for event-driven workflows and bursty workloads

Serverless functions shine when work is triggered by events (webhooks, messages, schedules, file uploads) and you want elastic execution without managing servers. Serverless is often a strong layer inside microservices & serverless systems—especially for async processing, automation, and integrations.

Service-to-service communication patterns

Strangler pattern for migrating from a monolith

Instead of a risky rewrite, extract capabilities gradually:
 

Data ownership, consistency, and integration patterns

Data is where most microservices projects get stuck. SHAPE’s approach to microservices & serverless systems centers on one idea: building modular and scalable backend systems requires clear data ownership and predictable consistency behavior.

Own your data per service (avoid shared databases)

As a default, each service should own its data store (or at minimum its schema). Shared databases create hidden coupling and make independent deployment difficult.

Embrace eventual consistency where it’s acceptable

Distributed systems rarely provide “instant correctness” everywhere. Decide which parts must be strongly consistent (payments, critical permissions) and which can be eventually consistent (analytics, notifications, denormalized views).

Use sagas for multi-step workflows

When a workflow crosses services (e.g., order → payment → fulfillment), use a saga pattern:

Idempotency is non-negotiable

Retries happen in microservices & serverless systems. Design handlers and endpoints so repeated requests don’t cause duplicate charges, duplicate records, or inconsistent states.

If you want to align service boundaries with a clean data model, pair this work with Database design & data modeling.

Security, reliability, and observability

When you adopt microservices & serverless systems, you’re adopting an operating model. Security and reliability must be built into the platform—otherwise building modular and scalable backend systems becomes expensive to maintain.

Security: identity-first, least privilege everywhere

Reliability: design for partial failure

Observability: logs, metrics, and traces as a baseline

Microservices are only “micro” until there’s an incident. SHAPE implements observability that makes debugging faster:

   
if you can’t trace a request end-to-end, you can’t reliably operate microservices & serverless systems at scale.
 

For cloud-native foundations that support these controls, see Cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Use case explanations

1) You’re scaling a product and monolith releases are slowing delivery

If every release requires coordination across many teams and risks breaking unrelated features, microservices & serverless systems can restore velocity by isolating changes—building modular and scalable backend systems with safer deployments and clearer ownership.

2) You need to handle bursty workloads without overprovisioning

Event-driven, serverless processing is a strong fit for spikes: webhooks, media processing, scheduled jobs, and queue-based workflows. You pay for usage and scale quickly without manual capacity planning.

3) Reliability issues are cascading across the platform

In tightly coupled systems, one dependency failure can become an outage. We reduce blast radius using async integration, resilience patterns, and stronger observability—core to microservices & serverless systems done right.

4) You’re splitting a monolith but can’t stop shipping features

We use incremental extraction (strangler pattern) to move safely: carve out one domain capability at a time, route traffic through a gateway, and keep the roadmap moving while the architecture modernizes.

5) Your integration surface is growing (partners, apps, internal tooling)

As more clients and partners rely on your backend, contracts and versioning become critical. We align microservices & serverless systems with robust API practices—see API development (REST, GraphQL).

Step-by-step tutorial: designing and shipping microservices & serverless systems

This playbook reflects how SHAPE approaches microservices & serverless systems to consistently deliver building modular and scalable backend systems without creating distributed chaos.

   
If you’re not ready to operate it (monitor it, on-call it, debug it), you’re not ready to split it. Operational readiness is part of building modular and scalable backend systems.
 

Call to action: build microservices & serverless systems with SHAPE

If you’re modernizing a monolith, scaling a platform, or designing a new backend foundation, SHAPE can help with microservices & serverless systems—focused on building modular and scalable backend systems that are reliable, observable, and maintainable.

Start a microservices & serverless systems engagement

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