--- title: "Software architecture patterns: Full catalog & how to choose" url: https://daily.dev/posts/software-architecture-patterns-full-catalog-how-to-choose-3yx5kohlx source_url: https://www.netguru.com/blog/software-architecture-patterns-guide type: article source: "Netguru" published: 2026-08-25T07:03:08.420Z updated: 2026-08-25T07:03:37.890Z tags: ["architecture", "serverless", "microservices"] reading_time: 15 upvotes: 9 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Software architecture patterns: Full catalog & how to choose **[Netguru](https://daily.dev/sources/netguru)** · 15 min read · 9 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A catalog of twelve software architecture patterns—layered, MVC, microkernel, client-server, microservices, event-driven, CQRS, saga, circuit breaker, strangler fig, serverless, and hexagonal—compared by team size, latency budget, and total cost of ownership. Distinguishes architecture styles (broad philosophies like microservices) from patterns (concrete solutions like CQRS), and argues most decomposition and pattern-selection mistakes come from confusing the two. Includes decision matrices for monolith vs. microservices trade-offs, serverless cold-start costs across runtimes, and guidance on when strangler fig migrations or CQRS pay off, drawing on Gartner, Camunda, Akamai, and Martin Fowler/Chris Richardson sources plus the authoring agency's own client migration experience. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### When should I choose microservices architecture over a monolith for my team? Microservices architecture makes sense once a team exceeds roughly 20 engineers with multiple domain teams needing independent deployability, async event-driven latency is acceptable, and the domain has high-churn areas needing separate release cadence. Below that, around 15-20 engineers, a monolith wins on latency, transactional simplicity, and total cost of ownership. A five-person team building an internal tool rarely benefits from microservices since the operational tax outweighs the gains. _Compare monolith versus microservices trade-offs on daily.dev before locking in a team's architecture direction._ ### How long do cold starts take for a Spring Boot app on AWS Lambda compared to Go? JVM-based Spring Boot cold starts on AWS Lambda commonly exceed 3-5 seconds without GraalVM native compilation, while Go and other compiled-native runtimes typically start in under a second. More broadly, compiled runtimes like Java and C# add 1.2-5+ seconds of cold-start latency, while interpreted runtimes like Node.js add roughly 200-500 ms. _Track runtime cold-start trade-offs like these on daily.dev when picking a serverless stack._ ### What is the difference between an architecture style and an architecture pattern? An architecture style is the broad organizing philosophy for how a whole system communicates and partitions state, such as layered, microservices, event-driven, or serverless architecture. A pattern is a specific, reusable solution to one recurring problem inside that style, such as CQRS, the strangler fig pattern, or the circuit breaker pattern. Hexagonal architecture is often mislabeled a microservices pattern when it is actually a style choice about isolating domain logic from infrastructure. _Follow discussions like this on daily.dev to keep architecture terminology straight before scoping a migration._ --- Tags: [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#serverless](https://daily.dev/tags/serverless), [#microservices](https://daily.dev/tags/microservices) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/software-architecture-patterns-full-catalog-how-to-choose-3yx5kohlx)