Compare Scenarios

Migration Step 1

Both scenarios define a migration step at this stage. Audit and Compliance Platform: triggered by 'Compliance audit finding that audit records were modified af'. Two-Sided Marketplace Platform: triggered by 'Checkout failures from payment provider unavailability causi'.

Migration Step 2

Both scenarios define a migration step at this stage. Audit and Compliance Platform: triggered by 'Compliance report generation taking > 5 minutes against Post'. Two-Sided Marketplace Platform: triggered by 'Listing search p99 > 1s; faceted navigation (category + pric'.

Migration Step 3

Both scenarios define a migration step at this stage. Audit and Compliance Platform: triggered by 'SIEM consumer lag causing it to fall behind retention window'. Two-Sided Marketplace Platform: triggered by 'Domain teams stepping on each other's schema migrations; dat'.

PostgreSQL write p99 > 20ms with low connection count; pg_stat_activity showing transactions serialized on the same partition's chain-tip read; ingestion throughput plateauing well below hardware limits; auto_explain showing sequential scan on audit_events for "SELECT hash FROM audit_events ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1"

Tier 1: Integrity Chain Write Serialization: Per-partition chain-tip read before each insert serializing concurrent audit writers. Recommended evolution: Introduce partition-level chain sequence tables: a single row per partition tracking the current chain tip with an advisory lock, eliminating the full table read. Alternatively, shard the integrity chain by source system or tenant, accepting per-shard chains rather than a single global chain. Use PostgreSQL INSERT ... RETURNING with sequence-assigned IDs to eliminate the pre-insert read entirely, deferring chain hash computation to an async integrity sealer that appends hashes in order without blocking the write path. .

Compliance investigator queries returning in > 30s; PostgreSQL showing high sequential scan counts on audit_events partitions; investigator-facing API p99 > 10s; pg_stat_statements showing actor_id-scoped queries without partition pruning in the query plan

Tier 2: Actor Query Full-Partition Scan: Missing secondary index table for actor_id and resource_id lookup paths across time-partitioned audit data. Recommended evolution: Build a secondary index table audit_events_by_actor(actor_id, event_time, event_id) populated synchronously on insert. Accept the additional write per event as the cost of O(log n) actor-scoped queries. Alternatively, route actor-scoped queries to ClickHouse where columnar storage makes actor_id filters efficient without a secondary B-tree index. .

Redis cache miss spike visible in monitoring; PostgreSQL query rate spiking for listing reads despite stable write volume; p99 listing API latency > 500ms during traffic spike events

Tier 1: Viral Listing Thundering Herd: Cache TTL expiry on hot listings during peak traffic: all concurrent requests bypass cache simultaneously. Recommended evolution: Implement staggered TTL jitter on listing cache entries; use probabilistic early refresh (refresh before TTL expiry when remaining TTL < 20% and request rate is high); implement single-flight/request coalescing at the application layer to collapse concurrent cache misses into a single database read .

Saga compensation events appearing in order event log; checkout p99 > 2s; pg_locks showing contended rows on inventory_reservations table; idempotency key conflicts increasing in payment service logs

Tier 2: Checkout Saga Contention: Concurrent checkout transactions competing for the same inventory rows; saga timeout thresholds too aggressive. Recommended evolution: Increase inventory reservation table partition count; tune saga step timeout to 2x the observed p99 for each step under load; implement a per-listing checkout serialization queue to prevent N concurrent sagas competing for the same inventory .