Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling: Choosing How to Grow
Scaling a system isn’t always as simple as adding more resources. As your application grows, the way you…
Category
System Design
Explore system design principles and strategies to build scalable, reliable, and high-performing software architectures for complex systems.
112 articles
Distributed Tracing: Following One Request Across Many Services
What is distributed tracing: the span and trace model, context propagation across services and queues, OpenTelemetry tracing and…
Metrics: Golden Signals, RED, and USE
Metrics monitoring for a distributed fleet: time series metrics (counters, gauges, histograms) the four golden signals, RED vs…
Logging: Structured, Centralized, and Searchable
Structured logging, log levels, centralized logging, and log aggregation: how a distributed fleet turns scattered events into one…
Monitoring and Observability: Knowing What Your System Is Doing
Observability vs monitoring, drawn honestly: what observability is as a property, the three pillars (logs, metrics, traces) the…
TLS for Backend Engineers: Handshakes, Certificates, and Production Hardening
TLS for Backend Engineers covers handshakes, certificates, and trust stores. Learn TLS 1.3 settings, rotation, and the failures…
Microservice System Design
Executive Summary: Splitting a monolith into services without design discipline trades one problem for distributed complexity. This post…
Blue-Green vs Canary Deployment: Shipping Without Downtime
Blue green vs canary deployment decided: zero downtime deployment mechanics, the canary release strategy and its observation ramp,…
Retry with Backoff and Jitter: Retrying Without Triggering Retry Storms
Retry with exponential backoff explained: backoff and jitter pacing, the retry storm math, retry budgets, what is safe…
Disaster Recovery: RTO, RPO, and Getting Back Online
Disaster recovery explained: RTO and RPO as the two numbers that size the plan, the disaster recovery strategies…
High Availability: Designing Away Single Points of Failure
High availability explained: the single point of failure hunt, n+1 redundancy sizing, failover design that does not become…
Backpressure: Managing Load You Cannot Process
Backpressure explained: the flow-control signal that travels from a slow consumer back to its producers; bounded queues where…
