The MMO Palia has a complex architecture, using Unreal Engine for its game engine and a microservice approach with services for specific player features. The game uses ScyllaDB (column store) for its main database along with PostgreSQL for specific use cases where a relational model is necessary. This article goes into deep detail about the architecture of the MMO and the reasoning behind each decision.

Architects should help guide engineering teams by making strategic, high-impact decisions while still allowing team members to have ownership of various parts of the team’s overall work. This means carefully considering decisions and their reversibility, along with documenting potential impact before acting.

Reddit started as a monolithic Python application and has evolved its architecture into smaller microservices in Golang. It replaced database snapshots with real-time data replication using Kafka. Reddit has a dedicated metadata store built with AWS Aurora Postgres and it uses Flink Stateful Functions for modern rule-based content moderation.

Microservices are popular and great for scalability and team organization, but can bring problems to smaller organizations. Too many services can be hard to maintain, create excessive interdependencies, and make downsizing difficult in tough economic times.