Distributed Systems (88)

Essays on distributed systems, databases, consensus, and fault tolerance.

49 blogs • 39 notes

2026

(45)

Aug 26

NOTE How S3 Enables Stateless Write-Ahead Logs Despite Latency Trade-offs

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #commit-latency
Aug 14

NOTE Fast Stores Can Mask Per-Item State Check Performance Issues

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #access-patterns #batching
Aug 11

NOTE AWS Route 53 Shuffle Sharding Uses Randomness To Reduce Failure Impact

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #aws-route-53 #blast-radius
Jul 28

NOTE Systematically Evaluate Design Alternatives and Prune Suboptimal Trade-offs

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #delivery-timelines #design-alternatives
Jul 27

NOTE Huge Pages Optimize Postgres Shared Buffers by Improving TLB Efficiency

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #databases
Jul 24

NOTE Bottlenecks in infrastructure never disappear they just move

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #bottleneck #bottleneck-relocation
Jul 20

NOTE Starting From Scratch Unlocks Radical Innovation By Challenging Assumptions

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #apache-spark #building-from-scratch
Jul 11

NOTE Bloom Filter Emerged as Key Evidence in OpenAI Copyright Dispute

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #bloom-filter #bloom-filters
Jul 09

NOTE Cloudflare's Meerkat Service Uses QuePaxa to Avoid Leader Problems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #cloudflare #consensus
Jul 06

NOTE Improve MySQL Master Failover Monitoring Using Replica Consensus

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consensus #databases
Jul 01

NOTE Predictability Is The Most Valuable Quality For Robust System Design

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #admission-control #backpressure
Jul 01

NOTE Spatial Join Operations Power Location-Based Services Like Uber and DoorDash

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #delivery-zones #geopandas
Jun 30

NOTE How Erasure Coding Achieves S3 Durability with Reduced Storage Costs

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #compute-tradeoff #data-durability
Jun 27

NOTE RocksDB's Sequence Numbers Simplify Database Snapshots and Concurrency

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #compaction #concurrency
Jun 23

NOTE PostgreSQL Uses Histograms and MCVs to Estimate Rows

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #histograms
Jun 19

NOTE Separating Compute From Storage Enables Serverless Database Pay-Per-Use

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #compute-storage-separation #databases
Jun 16

NOTE Platforms Offer Compounding Returns When Built and Adopted Effectively

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #abstraction #adoption
Jun 11

NOTE Consecutive 401 Responses Should Trigger Circuit Breakers Not Retries

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #401-errors #authentication-failure
Jun 11

NOTE Handle Consecutive 401 Errors with Circuit Breakers to Prevent Outages

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #401-unauthorized #blind-retries
Jun 04

NOTE Successful Big Migrations Require a Plank-by-Plank Replacement Strategy

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #full-cutover
May 25

NOTE Structured Pessimism Improves System Reliability Through Proactive Questioning

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #accountability #edge-cases
May 21

NOTE Key Considerations for Building Predictably Horizontally Scalable Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #asynchronous-queues #caching
May 20

BLOG Temporal Primer - Building Long-Running Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #ai-agents #career-growth
May 19

NOTE Approximating Least Recently Used Cache Eviction Using Two Random Choices

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #2-random #approximation
May 15

NOTE Designing Systems for Failure Ensures Graceful Error Handling and Quick Recovery

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #career-growth #design-for-failure
May 12

NOTE Distributed System Failures Often Stem From Unintended Omissions In Design

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #back-pressure #concurrency
May 02

NOTE Keeping L1 Small in LSM Trees Prevents Excessive Write Amplification

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #compaction #data-structures
May 01

NOTE Design Systems For Reversibility To Boost Confidence And Speed

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #architectural-decisions #databases
Apr 29

NOTE Pushdown optimization in pg_clickhouse improves data querying efficiency

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #clickhouse #data-filtering
Apr 28

BLOG Your Monolith Is Already A Distributed System

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #information-retrieval
Apr 23

NOTE Relational databases often suffice where graph databases are overengineering

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #algorithms #databases
Apr 22

NOTE Build Intuition for Distributed Systems by Asking Why and How

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #debugging #first-principles
Apr 22

NOTE Crashing immediately on startup prevents late-run fixable issues

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #career-growth #configuration-validation
Apr 14

NOTE Update Heavy PostgreSQL Workloads Require Autovacuum Tuning

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #autovacuum #concurrency
Apr 13

NOTE Correctness and Consistency are Different Things

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #correctness
Apr 11

NOTE It Depends Must Be Followed By Explanation

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #databases
Apr 08

NOTE Partially Synchronous Systems Achieve Balance in Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #asynchronous-systems #consistency
Apr 07

NOTE Happened-before relationship brings order to distributed systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #causality #clock-synchronization
Apr 06

NOTE Debugging Distributed Systems Requires Global and Local Views

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #career-growth #clock-synchronization
Apr 05

NOTE Simpler Solutions Beat Complexity in System Architecture

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #complexity
Apr 04

NOTE Consistency, Availability, Freshness Trade-offs in Real-time Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #availability #cap-theorem
Mar 08

BLOG Databases Were Not Designed For This

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #ai-agents #caching
Feb 24

BLOG JOIN Algorithms

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #data-structures #databases
Jan 27

BLOG Multi-Paxos - Consensus in Distributed Databases

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #clock-synchronization #consensus
Jan 16

BLOG MySQL Replication Internals

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #concurrency #databases

2025

(9)

Dec 23

BLOG Clock Synchronization Is a Nightmare

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #clock-synchronization #consistency
Dec 13

BLOG When You Increase Kafka Partitions

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #concurrency #networking
Nov 12

BLOG Heartbeats in Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #clock-synchronization #networking
Oct 20

BLOG How Writes Work in Apache Cassandra

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #databases
Oct 17

BLOG Redis Replication Internals

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #networking #replication
Oct 02

BLOG How Does a CDN Handle Content Replication

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #algorithms #career-growth
Sep 06

BLOG Why Distributed Systems Need Consensus Algorithms Like Raft

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #clock-synchronization #communication
Sep 05

BLOG Why Do Databases Deadlock and How Do They Resolve It

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #concurrency #databases
Sep 03

BLOG Why Eventual Consistency is Preferred in Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #networking

2024

(3)

2021

(15)

Nov 28

BLOG Multi-Master Replication - Why Conflicts Happen

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #replication
Nov 03

BLOG Multi-Master Replication - Scaling Writes Across Geographies

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #replication
Oct 03

BLOG Monotonic Reads - How Asynchronous Replication Creates Wormholes

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #replication
Sep 22

BLOG Read-Your-Writes Consistency

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #replication
Sep 07

BLOG What Happens When a Master or Replica Fails

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #replication
Aug 15

BLOG Replication Formats - Statement vs Row-based

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #networking
Aug 10

BLOG Replication Strategies - Synchronous, Asynchronous, and Semi-Synchronous

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #networking
Aug 07

BLOG Master-Replica Replication

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #replication
Jul 19

BLOG Decoding Durability - The D in ACID

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #databases
Jul 07

BLOG Decoding Isolation - The I in ACID

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #concurrency #consistency
Jul 02

BLOG Decoding Atomicity - The A in ACID

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #databases
Jul 02

BLOG Decoding Consistency - The C in ACID

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #databases
Jun 22

BLOG Architectural Patterns for Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #system-design
Jun 17

BLOG Fallacies of Distributed Computing Every Engineer Should Know

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #networking
Apr 19

BLOG Modeling Udemy's Categories in a Relational Database

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #python-internals

2020

(8)

Nov 29

BLOG The 2Q Algorithm - Addressing LRU's Sub-Optimality

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #databases
Aug 23

BLOG Implementing LFU in O(1)

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #memory-management
Jul 19

BLOG Bitcask - A Log-Structured fast KV store

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #data-structures #databases
May 31

BLOG The RUM Conjecture - Storage System Trade-offs

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #consistency #cryptography
May 24

BLOG Consistent Hashing - What It Is and How to Implement It

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #data-structures
May 03

BLOG Copy-On-Write - When to Use It, When to Avoid It

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #memory-management
Apr 26

BLOG How MySQL Avoids Performance Hits from Table Scans

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #caching #databases
Apr 05

BLOG Sliding Window Rate Limiting - Design and Implementation

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems

2017

(3)

Mar 24

BLOG Analyzing MongoDB Pagination Performance Differences

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases #evaluation
Mar 23

BLOG MongoDB Pagination - Skip is Slow

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases
Mar 22

BLOG MongoDB Pagination - Two Approaches You Need to Know

Distributed Systems #distributed-systems #databases

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