Where We Are
2025's web application landscape is a reaction to the over-engineering of the 2019–2022 microservices era. Teams that sharded too early are consolidating. The pendulum has swung toward pragmatism.
Here's what's actually working at scale today.
The Modular Monolith
The modular monolith — a single deployable with well-separated internal boundaries — is the most productive architecture for teams under 50 engineers. You get the simplicity of deployment without the spaghetti of an unmaintained big ball of mud.
Key principle: enforce module boundaries via the compiler or linter, not just convention.
Edge-First Rendering
Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit now let you push rendering to the edge — CDN nodes close to users. For read-heavy applications with predictable data, this eliminates round-trips to origin servers.
The pattern is: static shell + streaming server components + client islands for interactivity.
The Database Layer Is Critical
Most architecture decisions that "seem" like frontend or backend problems are actually data model problems. A well-normalized schema with proper indexing can serve 10x the traffic of a poorly designed one.
In 2025, Postgres remains the best default database for most applications. Extensions like pgvector (for AI embeddings) and TimescaleDB (for time-series) extend it further.
AI Integration Patterns
Every new application needs a story for AI. The two dominant patterns:
1. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): embed your domain data, retrieve relevant chunks, generate responses with context
2. Structured extraction: use LLMs to convert unstructured input (email, documents) into typed data your system can act on
Both require careful prompt engineering and fallback handling — LLMs are non-deterministic and will fail in production.
What We Use at EGLIFE
Our default stack: Next.js App Router + PostgreSQL + Prisma ORM + TypeScript throughout. For mobile: React Native with Expo. For AI features: Anthropic Claude API via structured outputs.
This stack is boring in the best possible way — battle-tested, well-documented, and easy to hire for.