10 Powerful Software Concepts You Should Know

How Big Tech Solves Software Problems You Didn’t Know Existed

These concepts are not just theories — major tech companies use them every day to scale, optimize, and prevent failures in production.

Sidecar Pattern

A sidecar is a design pattern used in microservices architecture, where an additional process (or container) runs alongside the main application to provide enhanced capabilities such as logging, security, or networking. Use it

• When you need to add features (like monitoring) without modifying the main app.
• In microservices architecture, where each service needs a proxy or helper.

Think of it like a restaurant kitchen has a chef (main app) and a waiter (sidecar) to manage orders and delivery, so the chef can focus just on cooking.

Netflix uses Envoy Proxy as a sidecar in its microservices architecture.

• Every service in Netflix runs with a sidecar proxy that manages networking, logging, and security.
• This allows Netflix to optimize traffic routing without modifying the actual service code.

When Netflix scales up, new services automatically inherit logging and security features…