We design and build the backends that products run on: event-driven systems, microservices, and multi-tenant SaaS platforms. AstraCloud Labs is a project-delivery consultancy. We take ownership of the engineering and ship the platform, rather than placing engineers into a team. The work tends to start with a clear question: what are the service boundaries, what is the contract between them, and how does the system behave when one part fails.
What we build
Most of our backend work falls into a handful of areas. They overlap in practice, since an event-driven platform usually means several services, a set of contracts between them, and a frontend that needs a sensible way to read and write data.
Event-driven architecture
Asynchronous systems built around message brokers (BullMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka), with idempotent consumers, retries, and dead-letter handling so events are processed once and failures stay contained.
Microservices
Services split along real domain boundaries, each owning its data and deployable on its own. We resist splitting too early and keep services coarse until the boundary is proven.
Multi-tenant SaaS
Tenant-aware isolation at the data and request layers, so one customer's data and load cannot reach another. We pick the isolation model (shared schema, schema-per-tenant, or database-per-tenant) to match the risk and scale.
Contract-first APIs
OpenAPI definitions agreed before implementation, so teams can build against a stable contract in parallel. Generated clients and validation keep the contract and the code in step.
Backend stacks
TypeScript (NestJS, Express), Python (FastAPI, Django, Flask), Golang, and Java (Spring Boot), with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis. We choose per project rather than forcing one stack onto every problem.
Frontend and BFF integration
Next.js, React, and Vue frontends backed by a backend-for-frontend layer that shapes data for the client, keeping the public-facing API clean and the frontend simple.
How we work
A backend is easy to start and hard to live with. The decisions that matter are the ones made before much code exists: where the boundaries sit, what the contracts say, and how the system fails. We spend the early part of a project getting those right.
Clear service boundaries
We draw boundaries around what changes together and is owned by one team, not around technology. A service should own its data and be deployable on its own. Getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake in a distributed system, so we treat boundaries as a deliberate decision rather than a default. If a single well-structured service fits the problem, we say so.
Contract-first
We define the API contract (OpenAPI) before building behind it. That lets a frontend and a backend, or two backend teams, work in parallel against something stable. For asynchronous work the same idea applies to events: the message shape is the contract, consumers are idempotent, and the broker is treated as part of the design rather than a detail.
Operational discipline
The system has to be runnable once it is live. We build in observability, sensible retries, and idempotency from the start, and we think about how a deploy, a slow dependency, or a poisoned message plays out before it happens in production.
What this looks like in delivery
- Boundaries and data ownership agreed before implementation, with the reasoning written down.
- OpenAPI contracts and event schemas defined first, so teams can build in parallel.
- Idempotent consumers, retries, and dead-letter handling on every message path.
- Tenant isolation enforced at the data and request layers in multi-tenant systems.
- Observability, logging, and failure handling treated as part of the build, not an afterthought.
Proof
For Motive Partners we led a migration to an event-driven architecture using BullMQ, ahead of the platform's sale to NCR. The work included microservices for webhooks, authentication callbacks, and payment integration with Plaid, with the asynchronous paths built to be idempotent and resilient to partial failure.
For Bauer Media we decoupled 34 sites from WordPress onto Next.js, backed by an event-driven backend using RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, and GraphQL. The backend feeds content to the sites through a layer shaped for the frontend, which is the same backend-for-frontend pattern we apply elsewhere.
If you are weighing the two architectural styles these projects use, we wrote up the trade-offs in event-driven versus microservices.
What you get
- A backend designed around real boundaries and stable contracts, not a guess at the start of the project.
- Event-driven and multi-tenant systems built to handle failure and isolation rather than assuming the happy path.
- Delivery by a consultancy that owns the engineering through to production, not a placement of engineers into your team.
Where this fits
A backend is only as good as what it runs on and how it is secured. We deliver this alongside cloud infrastructure and DevOps for the deployment, scaling, and pipelines, and security and compliance for tenant isolation, access control, and data handling. For the reasoning behind the architectural choices, see our write-up on event-driven versus microservices.
