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Dhaval Agr'vat
Dhaval Agr'vat

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Your API is Cute, But Where's the Real Backend?

#backend #webdev #architecture #node

🛸 Imagine This...
You open a brand-new restaurant. You've got:

  • A counter
  • A waiter taking orders
  • A chef making food
  • A menu

Great! You're officially serving CRUD:

  • Create = New orders
  • Read = View menu or order
  • Update = Change your order
  • Delete = Cancel your order

🎉 Congrats! You made a backend!

But here's what happens next:

👥 10 customers walk in. Fine.
🍽️ 100 show up during lunch rush. Okay.
📱 1000 hit your restaurant via a food delivery app. Uh-oh.

Now:

  • Half want live order tracking
  • Some cancel midway
  • A few never pay
  • Someone's spamming your system with fake orders
  • Chefs are overwhelmed

💥 Your CRUD-only "backend" crumbles.

🧠 Let's Build the Real Backend

You don't just need a backend - you need a system.

Here's how restaurant operations map to real backend architecture:

🔐 1.Security: No One Walks Into the Kitchen Unchecked

Imagine your restaurant is booming. Orders are flying in. But suddenly… someone walks into the kitchen, swaps ingredients, and walks out.

Or worse - someone pretends to be a waiter and starts serving random food to customers.

That's what happens when your API isn't secured.

Let's break this down 👇

🪪 Identity Checks: Who Are You?

Before anyone touches an order - they need to identify themselves.

In backend terms, this is Authentication.

We do this using:

  • Access Tokens (JWTs) - Like an ID badge that proves the user is who they say they are.
  • API Keys - For third-party apps like the delivery service.
  • OAuth - When users log in via Google or GitHub.

🛡️ Just like a chef won't cook an order without a valid ticket, your backend shouldn't process any request without verifying the token.

💡 Tools like jsonwebtoken in Node.js validate JWT tokens. Frameworks like Express.js or Fastify offer middleware to intercept and verify them.

✅ Access Control: Can You Do That?

Great - they're inside. But can they actually update an order?

This is Authorization.

Think of:

  • Chefs who can update food status
  • Waiters who can place/cancel orders
  • Customers who can only see or track their own order

In the backend, this translates to Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) or Permission-based logic.

💡 Tools like casbin, custom role logic, or even simple conditionals (if (user.role !== 'admin') return 403) help manage who does what.

🧼 Input Validation: No Pineapple in Butter Chicken

Someone tries to order a "Drop All Tables Curry"? 😳

This is where input validation kicks in.

Before you forward an order to the kitchen (a.k.a your database), validate it:

  • Is it a real menu item?
  • Are the quantities valid?
  • Is the request format correct?

We use tools like:

  • zod, yup, joi – Schema validators to check request bodies
  • Built-in type systems (like TypeScript) for extra safety 
const OrderSchema = z.object({
  item: z.string(),
  quantity: z.number().min(1),
});
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💡 Always sanitize and validate inputs to avoid SQL injections, malformed data, or logic-breaking bugs.

🤝 Secure Responses: Don't Reveal the Secret Sauce

Imagine if your waiter yells: "Here's your Chicken Curry! By the way, the chef's password is '1234'!"

Just like requests, your responses must be clean and secure:

  • Don't leak internal server info (err.stack, .env values, etc.)
  • Strip sensitive fields like passwords, tokens, or internal IDs
  • Use HTTP status codes wisely (401, 403, 500) to give just enough feedback

💡 Use libraries like helmet for HTTP headers, or add custom middleware to sanitize responses.

🧾 2. Order Queue → Message Queues (RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka)

Problem: Your kitchen can't handle 200 orders at once. You need order flow control.

Backend Equivalent:
Use a message broker (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis Streams, or AWS SQS) to queue jobs like:

  • Sending confirmation emails
  • Cooking order items
  • Notifying delivery agents 
// Example: RabbitMQ Consumer
channel.consume("order_queue", async (msg) => {
  const order = JSON.parse(msg.content.toString());
  await processOrder(order);
  channel.ack(msg);
});
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✅ Decouples tasks
✅ Handles burst traffic
✅ Supports retries & backpressure

🔗 Intro to Message Queues

📡 3. Bell in the Kitchen → Webhooks

Problem: Don't cook if the customer hasn't paid.

Backend Equivalent:
Set up webhooks to get notified by external services (e.g., Stripe, Razorpay):

// Incoming webhook payload
{
  "event": "payment.success",
  "order_id": "ORD-9982",
  "amount": 1599
}
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✅ Event-driven
✅ Reduces polling
✅ Must handle idempotency and retries

🔗 Handling Stripe Webhooks

📆 4. Daily Inventory Check → Cron Jobs / Scheduled Tasks

Problem: Stock levels must be monitored every night.

Backend Equivalent:
Use cron jobs or serverless schedulers for:

  • Inventory reports
  • Auto-expire coupons
  • Syncing external APIs

Tools:

cron.schedule('0 2 * * *', checkInventory); // 2AM daily
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⚖️ 5. Hiring More Chefs → Load Balancers & Horizontal Scaling

Problem: One chef isn't enough during rush hours.

Backend Equivalent:
Scale your backend horizontally. Spin up more instances behind a load balancer.

Common setups:

  • NGINX / HAProxy: Software load balancers
  • AWS ALB / GCP Load Balancing: Cloud-native
  • Sticky Sessions for session affinity

🔗 How Load Balancing Works

🔁 6. Failed Orders → Retry Logic + Backoff

Problem: Sometimes a payment fails due to a network glitch. Try again!

Backend Equivalent:
Add retry strategies with exponential backoff:

function retry(fn, attempts = 3, delay = 1000) {
  return fn().catch((err) => {
    if (attempts === 0) throw err;
    return wait(delay).then(() => retry(fn, attempts - 1, delay * 2));
  });
}
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✅ Avoids spamming
✅ Handles flakiness

Use libraries like:

🧠 7. Prepping Fries in Advance → Caching (Redis, CDN)

Problem: You don't need to check the database every time someone asks for the menu.

Backend Equivalent:
Cache data that doesn't change often:

  • Menus
  • Product listings
  • Session data
  • Auth tokens

Tools:

  • Redis for key-value store
  • CDNs (Cloudflare, Fastly) for static assets 
await redis.set("menu", JSON.stringify(menuData), "EX", 3600); // TTL 1hr
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🧯 8. No Free Refills → Rate Limiting / API Throttling

Problem: One customer is spamming 1000 orders/sec.

Backend Equivalent:
Add rate limiters per IP / token to control abuse.

Tools:

// Basic rate limit
limit: 100 requests per 15 minutes per user
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🧩 9. Specialized Stations → Microservices

Problem: Dessert chefs shouldn't handle pizzas.

Backend Equivalent:
Split your monolith into bounded services:

  • orders-service
  • inventory-service
  • payments-service
  • notifications-service

Tech:

  • REST / gRPC for service-to-service
  • Use service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) as it grows
  • Consider event-driven architecture (Pub/Sub)

🧪 10. Today's Specials → Feature Flags

Problem: You want to test a new dish only for VIPs.

Backend Equivalent:
Use feature flags to control access dynamically:

  • Roll out new features to 10% of traffic
  • Enable beta access for internal users

Tools:

📊 11. CCTV & Logs → Observability, Logging, Monitoring

Problem: You need to know what failed, when, and why.

Backend Equivalent:
Log everything. Watch metrics. Set alerts.

📈 Tools:

  • Logs: Winston, Pino, Bunyan
  • Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana, Datadog
  • Errors: Sentry, Rollbar
  • Tracing: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger

You should know:

  • Which API took 5 seconds
  • Why payments dropped at 4PM
  • How many orders failed in last 24h

🧠 Realization Time

Running a restaurant at scale isn't about CRUD. It's orchestration.
The same goes for your backend.

CRUD is a form.
A real backend is an operational system built for:

✅ Load
✅ Failure
✅ Consistency
✅ Monitoring
✅ Growth

🚀 TL;DR: What's Really Behind a Backend?

Restaurant Concept Backend Implementation
Menu / Orders / Kitchen Basic CRUD APIs
Queue Tickets RabbitMQ / SQS / Kafka
Bell on Payment Webhooks
Nightly Stock Check Cron Jobs / Scheduled Tasks
Extra Chefs Load Balancer + Auto-Scaling
Retry Order Retry Logic with Backoff
Prepped Fries Redis / CDN Caching
Spam Guard Rate Limiting + Validation
Pizza/Dessert Counters Microservices / Bounded Contexts
Specials Only for VIPs Feature Flags
CCTV + Logs Monitoring + Observability
Staff Only Zones Auth + Role-based Access

🙌 Final Thought

A real backend isn't built for happy paths.
It's built for reality - where users fail, networks flake, traffic spikes, and money's on the line.

CRUD is the starting point.
Resilience is the real job.

🔐 Coming Up Next: Locking Down the Backend (Part 2 of the Series)

So far, we've built the kitchen. But what about keeping it safe?

In the next post, we'll explore how to truly secure your backend, covering topics like:

  • ✅ Real-world JWT-based authentication (and avoiding the usual pitfalls)
  • 🧪 Schema validation using Zod - making sure no weird inputs get through
  • ✍️ Request signatures - validating external payloads before trusting them
  • 🛡️ Common security threats (XSS, CSRF, etc.) and how to prevent them
  • 🔑 Managing secrets, tokens, and environment variables the right way

Because backend development isn't just about scaling and queuing - it's also about trust, safety, and protecting what matters.

Stay tuned - your backend's security game is about to level up.

Top comments (13)

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derstruct profile image
Alex •

That's underrated.
Thanks.

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Glad you think so! Appreciate you dropping by 🙌

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derstruct profile image
Alex •

By the way, using a message queue for serving... a real queue (orders) is an educational metaphor, right?

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Yep! Thought it’d make the idea of queues feel a bit more real 😄

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programir profile image
Amir •

I really liked this post! I'm a Full Stack .NET Developer and I make ASP.NET Web Core API's, and I know how much API's can get very complex. And RIP this is something that nobody even sees, the people only look at frontend.

What you could add maybe is talking about

  • optimization. methaphor could be how macdonald can serve so quickly and thus can increase amount of client per chef
  • API Key for when other restaurants could benefit of your restaurants, you can limit it, track how much you helped and more
  • Testing. like unit tests and other type of tests, see if a dish taste good before putting in menu
  • Maintenance. updating depedencies, so if a ingredient is expired not good to consume anymore, vulnerabilitie cause get client sick.
  • Versioning. if you have a lifetime access for food you sold before, but then realized it was a very bad idea so discountinue it (no way to buy it), but people who already bought the lifetime access should still be able to use it or they will go to court.
  • Documentation. like if you let people cook their meat in their seat like some restaurant do, then a paper on the table showing the steps on how to do it.
  • Analysis. like with posthog
  • Orchestration with like .NET Aspire.
  • scaling, not like load balancing and horizontal scaling alone, but more like with k8s
  • compliancie to like conform to the gdpr. or to never leak the sensitive info in logs annotate with nuget packages the fields.
  • developer/stagging/production envirement. when in developer envirement when testing don't count the made dishes as sold for analysis for exemple. (like having multiple different implementation of same interface, depending on envirement) ... and much more!

Very inspirational! (meaning I want to also post now as good as you do!)

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Thank you ❤️ - I absolutely loved your ideas as well! I’ve just started writing recently, so I hope you start too, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for your posts. 😜

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gaj3nder_09 profile image
GAJENDER •

great information

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful 🙌

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bahmed_sofiane_0e79552aef profile image
bahmed sofiane •

straight to the point, i like it

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Appreciate it! That’s the vibe I’m going for 😎

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its_just_anon profile image
Chris C. •

Thanks for this post. I'm very new to being a full-stack developer, going on 6 months, and this was very helpful. Thanks for the analogies and what to look out for in the future for scaling.

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dhaval_agrvat_6e65394a83 profile image
Dhaval Agr'vat •

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful 🙌

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mohit1607 profile image
mohit1607 •

Really everything I needed to know

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