Redis — The In-Memory Data-Structure Store, End to End
Redis is one of the most-used pieces of infrastructure in the world — the fast…
Tag
#distributed-systems
20 posts
Apache Kafka — The Distributed Log, End to End
Apache Kafka runs the event backbone of a huge fraction of modern systems…
Distributed Systems in Practice — Failures, Time, Consensus and Correctness
Every backend engineer today builds distributed systems, whether they call it…
Cascading Failures and Resilience Patterns
The worst outage I was ever part of started with a single missing index. A new…
Transactions Across Services: 2PC, Sagas and the Outbox
Here’s a bug I helped track down in an e-commerce backend. Customers would…
Observability + Capstone: Designing and Debugging a Distributed System
Here’s a question I like to ask in interviews: “A customer says checkout took 1…
Distributed Locks, Leases and Fencing Tokens
Let me go back to the story from Lesson 6: a scheduler that ran on several pods…
Messaging and Delivery Guarantees
Every company I’ve worked with has had at least one “duplicate” incident from a…
Partitioning and Consistent Hashing
A team I knew ran their session cache on four Redis servers. The client library…
Time, Clocks and Ordering
Some time ago, I was helping debug a strange complaint from a delivery app: “I…
Consensus With Raft
I once watched a team spend two months building “a simple leader election” for…
Consistency Models, CAP and PACELC
Early in my career, I sat in a design review where someone said, “We’ll use…
Replication and Quorums
The first time I set up database replication for a project, I thought of it as a…
Timeouts, Retries and Idempotency
Here’s a bug I’ve seen in some form at three different companies. A cashback…
Why Distributed Systems Fail Differently
A few years back, during a big sale, a friend’s team at an e-commerce company…
Design a Unique ID Generator
Generating unique IDs sounds trivial until you remove the single database that…
Replication and Consistency
Almost every scalable system keeps more than one copy of its data. The moment…
Cracking the System Design Interview
System design interviews are the most feared round in senior engineering…
Design a Web Crawler
Web crawlers are the backbone of search engines. Google’s crawler discovers and…
System Design Masterclass
System design is the skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else…