Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Building distributed systems is challenging due to their complexity, scale, and unpredictability. Common strategies to increase performance and reliability are queues, retries, caches and more. But be aware! Naively implemented optimizations have often the very much opposite effect to what you expect. While they can not only prevent your system from working they can even affect your recovery process, which is even worse.
In this session we will explore why you cannot simply add a retry here, a queue there and have a highly performant and reliable system. We will dive deeper into how to properly implement mechanisms and patterns in distributed systems to reduce failures and make recovery as smooth as possible.
Building distributed systems is challenging due to their complexity, scale, and unpredictability. Common strategies to increase performance and reliability are queues, retries, caches and more. But be aware! Naively implemented optimizations have often the very much opposite effect to what you expect. While they can not only prevent your system from working they can even affect your recovery process, which is even worse.
In this session we will explore why you cannot simply add a retry here, a queue there and have a highly performant and reliable system. We will dive deeper into how to properly implement mechanisms and patterns in distributed systems to reduce failures and make recovery as smooth as possible.
![[VDBUH2026] George Patrașcu - Ports, Adapters, and Other Ways to Stop Breaking Your Business Logic](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UIlFFBZKSaA/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] George Patrașcu - Ports, Adapters, and Other Ways to Stop Breaking Your Business Logic
Your business logic shouldn’t care whether it’s talking to a SQL database, a Kafka topic, or a REST API — but in most codebases, it does. In a microservice architecture, this coupling becomes especially painful: as services evolve and API versions change, you end up touching business logic just to keep up with infrastructure churn.
In this talk, we’ll explore Hexagonal Architecture (Ports & Adapters) as a practical answer to this problem.
We’ll start with the “why”: not to dismiss traditional layered architectures — they solve real problems, and it’s the model we use across many of our own services — but to examine the specific caveats that emerge as systems grow.
Where does coupling infrastructure concerns to business logic start to hurt? Hexagonal Architecture doesn’t throw layering out the window; it refines it, offering targeted solutions to those exact pain points. From there, we’ll walk through the core concepts of the pattern — ports, adapters, and the application core.
But this won’t be a textbook walkthrough. Everything you’ll see is grounded in real production experience. We’ll share the challenges we ran into, the mistakes we made, and the tradeoffs we had to navigate — including the pragmatic vs. dogmatic decisions that come up constantly in practice (should your ORM bleed into your domain model? It depends).
You’ll leave with:
– A clear mental model of Hexagonal Architecture and when it’s worth reaching for
– Concrete code examples of ports and adapters in action, written in C#
– Different approaches to structuring your project (and when to choose each)
– An honest look at the tradeoffs — including when not to use this pattern
Whether you’re building a new service or wrestling with an existing one, this talk will give you practical tools to make your business logic more resilient, testable, and independent of the infrastructure around it.")
