Welcome back to TechTalks with Manoj — where we stop pretending distributed systems are simple and start designing them like they’re not.

Today’s topic: message queues beyond the basics.

On diagrams, they look clean — producers, brokers, consumers, done.In production, they’re where consistency breaks, lag grows silently, and “exactly-once” turns out to mean “almost never.”

We’ll talk about delivery guarantees that actually matter, why idempotency is non-negotiable, how the outbox pattern saves you from data corruption, and when exactly-once is worth the cost — and when it absolutely isn’t.

If you’re building systems that have to survive retries, failures, and real traffic — not demos —this episode is for you.

Let’s get started. 🎙️

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Welcome back to TechTalks with Manoj — the show where we cut through distributed systems theory and talk about what actually survives production.

Today, we’re diving into Choreography vs Orchestration in microservices.

On paper, choreography promises freedom — no central controller, no bottlenecks, just services reacting to events.In reality, it’s also how teams end up with distributed workflows no one can fully see, trace, or explain at 2 AM.

In this episode, we’ll break down how choreography really works with Sagas, events, and compensation — why the Transactional Outbox is non-negotiable — and when orchestration is still the smarter, more boring, but safer choice.

If you’ve ever wondered where your request actually went, or why your “decoupled” system feels harder to operate every month —this one’s for you.

Let’s get into it. 🎙️

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Welcome back to TechTalks with Manoj — the show where we take the problems everyone pretends to understand, strip out the jargon, and explain what actually matters when you’re trying to keep microservices from behaving like a pack of unsupervised toddlers in production.

Today, we’re diving into a topic that quietly makes or breaks every distributed system out there: Service Discovery.

Now, most teams don’t think about service discovery until things catch fire.You know the moment — some service suddenly can’t find another service, requests start timing out, dashboards go red, and everyone starts asking, “Who changed the IP address?” Spoiler: nobody did. Your architecture just outgrew the idea of static endpoints.

In this episode, we’re unpacking the part of microservices that rarely gets spotlighted, but absolutely determines whether your system scales elegantly…or collapses at the first sign of traffic.

We’ll break down:

• Why static IPs died the moment containers became mainstream — and why pretending otherwise is a career-limiting move.• Client-side vs. server-side discovery — and why stuffing discovery logic inside every service is a great way to create long-term maintenance debt.• How Kubernetes, DNS, and the humble ClusterIP quietly solved 80% of discovery challenges.• Why Service Mesh took things to the next level with sidecars, mTLS, and traffic intelligence that feels like magic — until you deploy it.• The real differences between Consul, Etcd, and Eureka — and how their consistency models shape your system’s behavior under failure.• And finally, what it actually looks like to implement service discovery cleanly in .NET — without hardcoding endpoints or shipping “temporary” config files that mysteriously live forever.

By the end of this episode, you’ll stop thinking of service discovery as plumbing, and start seeing it for what it truly is:the dynamic address book that keeps your microservices talking to each other — accurately, consistently, and without waking you up at 2 AM.

So if you’ve ever chased a failing service across shifting IPs…if you’ve ever watched Kubernetes reschedule pods faster than your logs can keep up…or if you’ve simply wondered why your system sometimes can’t find the thing it’s calling—

This episode is your map through the madness.

Let’s get into it. ⚙️

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.