# System Design
All System Design notes →Chapter 1 — Monoliths & the Modular Monolith
Why a well-modularized monolith is a legitimate architecture choice, and how it evolves into services under real pressure, not fashion.
Chapter 2 — Microservices
Service boundary design and the anti-patterns — distributed monolith, shared database, chatty synchronous calls — that erase the benefits microservices promise.
Chapter 3 — Event-Driven Architecture
Decoupling services through events rather than direct calls, and the ordering/consistency trade-offs that decoupling introduces.
Chapter 4 — Data Mesh
Decentralizing data ownership to domain teams as a data-platform architecture, and the governance model that keeps it from fragmenting.
Chapter 5 — Service Mesh
Sidecar-based traffic management, mTLS, and observability at the network layer, and when the operational cost is worth paying.
Chapter 6 — Platform Engineering
Why platform engineering is the organizational answer to microservices and infrastructure sprawl at scale.