Startup Pillars

I'm assuming you're mainly focusing on software product architecture, There are a few trends which are currently widely adopted. one of them is the microservices architecture this link explains some of the widely used architectures and gives a few examples along with use cases (https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/top-5-software-archit...) each of the mentioned architecture is vast enough to warrant a few books on each of the architecture. So I would recommend reading into what you might want master, as mastering all of it would require fair amount of time and effort. The principles mentioned can be applied to database design methodologies as well.

If you have to break it down in terms of raw basics, what approach you choose largely depends on what you want to achieve. Performance or security. wanting both requires large amount of human as well as computing resources. As a general example, consider node or apache, node gives you a performance improvement in terms of raw latency and concurrency by a factor of ~20-100 (based on a few simple tests i've done using apache bench) in most scenarios compared to apache but in terms of reliability, if your code for any reason doesn't handle exceptions, it takes down your entire server/service. With apache, that wont happen, your perfomance degrades, some users might get affected but the service as a whole would still be operational. This is just an example, most of the technology out there is about making the choice on what you're okay with comprimising with the available resources (human and computational) that you have. This is just my view on it.