Systems Engineering
API gateways and distributed systems that hold up under load
A single well-designed gateway and a clear set of service boundaries prevent most of the failures that show up later as cascading outages. Stellar Forge designs the API layer and service architecture underneath your product — the part users never see, but always feel when it's wrong.
Where distributed systems get fragile
As products grow past a single application, teams typically add services faster than they add the contracts, versioning discipline, and failure isolation between them. The result: one slow downstream service takes down an entire request path, API changes break clients without warning, and nobody can say with confidence which service owns which piece of data.
Our approach
Gateway as a single, deliberate front door
Centralized auth, rate limiting, and routing so every service doesn't reimplement the same cross-cutting concerns.
Contracts that don't break silently
Versioned APIs and schema validation so downstream consumers aren't surprised by upstream changes.
Isolation over cascading failure
Circuit breakers, timeouts, and bulkheads so one degraded service doesn't take the rest down with it.
Clear service ownership
Explicit boundaries and data ownership per service — the foundation for scaling a team as well as a system.
What's included
- API gateway design and implementation (auth, rate limiting, routing)
- Service boundary and domain modeling for distributed systems
- Contract-first API design with versioning strategy
- Resilience patterns: retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, bulkheads
- Event-driven and queue-based integration between services
Ready to scope this?
Tell us where things stand today and where you need to get to. We'll respond with an honest read on approach and effort.
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