16 - The Backends for Frontends and Strangler Pattern with Peter Piper
Managing APIs across web, mobile, and multiple consumer types creates tight coupling that slows modernisation and makes versioning painful. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by Peter Piper to explore the Backend for Frontends (BFF) pattern — creating dedicated backends tailored to each consumer — alongside the Strangler Fig pattern for incrementally migrating legacy monoliths without disrupting existing clients. The Façade pattern also features as a key decoupling mechanism for smooth API migrations. Part of the “Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time” series.
The Backend for Frontends pattern, first documented by Sam Newman in 2015, addresses the challenge of serving fundamentally different clients — desktop browsers and mobile apps — from a single general-purpose API. By introducing a thin, consumer-specific backend, teams can optimise API responses for each client’s constraints without forcing unnecessary complexity into the shared API layer.
The Strangler Fig pattern complements this by providing a safe, incremental path away from legacy systems. Rather than a high-risk big-bang rewrite, a façade intercepts traffic and progressively redirects calls to new implementations as they are built and verified. Chris and Peter discuss practical guidance on when to use each pattern, how high cohesion and low coupling principles apply, and the operational trade-offs teams must consider — including increased surface area for DevOps pipelines and security controls.
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5 - The API Economy
APIs are the connective tissue of modern cloud architectures — but poor API design compounds into technical debt that is expensive to unwind. In this episode, Chris Reddington and Peter Piper explore the full lifecycle of API design: defining versioning contracts up front, modernising legacy APIs using the Strangler and Façade patterns, and securing APIs with JWT tokens, OAuth 2.0, and OIDC. They also cover Azure API Management patterns, circuit breakers, throttling, key rotation with Azure Key Vault, and the DevSecOps practices that keep an API estate healthy at scale.
15 - The Sharding and Index Table Patterns
Concerned about the scalability of your data layer, or do you need data segregation for customers with regional data residency requirements? The Sharding pattern addresses exactly these challenges. If you are using a NoSQL data store without native secondary index support, the Index Table pattern provides an elegant solution for efficient querying. In this episode, Chris is joined by Steph Martin to explore both patterns in depth: shard key strategies (lookup, range, hash), cross-shard query design, the Azure SQL Database elastic client library, and how the Index Table pattern solves query efficiency challenges in stores like Cassandra and Cosmos DB.
14 - The Deployment Stamps Pattern
The Deployment Stamps pattern is a powerful cloud architecture approach for scaling, resilience, and multi-tenancy. In this episode, Chris Reddington is joined by John Downs — who contributed the pattern to the Azure Architecture Center — to explore how stamping out independent copies of your application stack across regions enables geographic distribution, data sovereignty, isolated failure domains, and deployment rings for staged rollouts. Discover when to use this pattern, how Azure itself relies on it internally, and the key considerations around request routing, cross-stamp querying, and disaster recovery planning.