How do I pick which playbook to run first?

Start where user pain and dollar impact intersect. If you have a slow web journey (LCP > 2.5s), fix the SPA + Edge playbook. If backend p95 spikes during load, do gateway + microservices. Tie the effort to a single SLO and a single KPI (e.g., checkout conversion) for 2 weeks.

What if our infra team can’t support all these tools?

You don’t need everything on day one. Start with `OpenTelemetry` traces, `Prometheus` RED metrics, and `Lighthouse`. GitOps the configs you touch (gateway, HPA, rollouts). Add more once SLOs stabilize.

How do we prevent performance regressions after we fix them?

Gate releases on SLOs with `Argo Rollouts` or `Flagger`, add perf budgets in CI (Lighthouse CI, k6 smoke), and alert on error budget burn rates. Make regressions visible in standups with a tiny scorecard.

Will these changes blow up our cloud bill?

Usually the opposite. Killing N+1s, adding caches, and tuning timeouts reduce waste. If you add capacity (e.g., Provisioned Concurrency), measure business lift. We’ve seen +1–4% conversion dwarf single-digit percent cost increases.

Performance-optimization · Oct 1, 2025 · 10 minute read

The Playbooks That Actually Move the Needle: Performance Recipes for Monoliths, Microservices, and Serverless

You don’t need another “optimize your queries” blog. You need battle-tested playbooks tied to user metrics and revenue. Here’s what actually works—and how to measure it.

Back to all posts

The Playbooks That Actually Move the Needle: Performance Recipes for Monoliths, Microservices, and Serverless

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist