System Design
A curated collection of in-depth guides on distributed systems, databases, caching, event streaming, and scalable architecture patterns.
5 articles •
Database Architectures, Indexing & Sharding
Why "just pick Postgres" isn't always the answer, how B-Trees and LSM-Trees actually change your write performance, and what breaks when you shard a database without thinking about your query patterns first.
Load Balancing Strategies & Failover Mechanisms
What actually happens when your single web server can't keep up, why sticky sessions become a production headache, and how consistent hashing fixes the "adding a server reshuffles everything" problem.
Distributed Caching & Eviction Policies
Why a database that handled 10K requests a minute falls over at 10:01, and how cache write policies, eviction strategies, and distributed caching failure modes actually get chosen in production.
Apache Kafka & Event Streaming Architecture
What actually breaks when your checkout flow calls five services synchronously, and how Kafka's partitions, consumer groups, and replication fix it — plus what goes wrong with rebalances and acks in production.
RESTful API Design & Versioning Strategies
Why a "quick" field rename in your API broke three mobile clients, and how resource modeling, pagination, versioning, and rate limiting prevent that from happening again.