System Design

⏱ 5 min read SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and error budgets are the quantitative framework for reliability engineering. An SLI […] Read article

⏱ 3 min read Zero-downtime deployment updates production services without dropping user requests. Modern techniques — rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary releases — Read article

⏱ 5 min read Feature flags (feature toggles) decouple code deployment from feature release. Code ships to production with a feature disabled; the flag Read article

⏱ 5 min read Read-heavy systems serve many more reads than writes — often 100:1 or higher ratios. Optimizing for reads requires layered caching, Read article

⏱ 3 min read Write-heavy systems must sustain high write throughput without overwhelming the storage layer. Techniques include write batching, asynchronous writes, write coalescing, Read article

⏱ 3 min read Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform built around a partitioned, replicated, append-only log. Understanding Kafka internals — partitioning Read article

⏱ 3 min read Cross-region failover reroutes traffic from a failed primary region to a healthy secondary region. The failover must be fast (under Read article

⏱ 4 min read Binary protocols encode messages as compact byte sequences, achieving lower overhead, faster parsing, and smaller payloads than text-based formats (JSON, Read article

⏱ 4 min read Platform engineering builds an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that provides self-service infrastructure capabilities to application teams. Instead of every team Read article

⏱ 3 min read Data tiering organizes data across storage tiers based on access frequency and cost sensitivity. Hot data (frequently accessed) lives on Read article

⏱ 4 min read Tail latency (p99, p999 latency) is the response time experienced by the slowest few percent of requests. While average latency Read article

⏱ 3 min read Content fingerprinting detects duplicate or near-duplicate content at scale: identifying web pages that have been copied, finding similar images across Read article

⏱ 3 min read Adaptive concurrency limiting automatically tunes the number of concurrent requests a service allows based on observed performance. Unlike static rate Read article

⏱ 4 min read Graceful shutdown ensures a service stops cleanly: completing in-flight requests, draining connections, flushing buffers, and releasing resources before the process Read article

⏱ 3 min read A Write-Ahead Log (WAL) is the durability mechanism at the heart of most databases and storage systems. Before any data Read article