A DEV Community article examines a Task Management App built with Node.js, Express, and PostgreSQL, all containerized using Docker Compose. The study focuses on performance, reliability, and observability, providing a practical look at cloud-native architecture principles in action.

Load testing with Apache Benchmark revealed the system handles normal loads well but struggles under high concurrency, showing increased latency and timeouts. Bottlenecks were traced to CPU-heavy backend API processes and database query pressure, impacting p95 latency and error rates.

To address these issues, the author proposes autoscaling the backend API, adding caching to the /tasks endpoint, and optimizing database queries with connection pooling. These improvements aim to boost scalability and resource efficiency for production environments.