Load Shedding: Dropping Traffic to Stay Alive
Load shedding explained: overload survival by dropping work deliberately: graceful degradation ladders chosen in advance, server overload protection…
Category
System Design
Explore system design principles and strategies to build scalable, reliable, and high-performing software architectures for complex systems.
112 articles
Idempotency: Designing Operations That Survive Retries
Idempotency explained: operations that survive retries and duplicates, the idempotency key from client to dedup table, idempotent API…
The Saga Pattern: Distributed Transactions Without Two-Phase Commit
The saga pattern explained: long-lived business transactions as local steps with compensating transactions, orchestration vs choreography, the transactional…
Distributed Locks: Mutual Exclusion Across Machines
Distributed locks explained: leases and TTLs as mutual exclusion across machines; the Redis distributed lock and its failover…
Fault-Tolerant Systems: Redundancy, Failover, and Failure Detection
Fault tolerant system design: failure models from crash to byzantine, redundancy and the N+1 arithmetic, the failover playbook,…
Distributed Transactions: Two-Phase Commit and Its Alternatives
Distributed transactions explained: two-phase commit step by step, the 2pc coordinator failure that leaves participants in doubt, consensus-backed…
Leader Election in Distributed Systems: Methods and Split-Brain Risk
Leader election in distributed systems explained: leader election algorithms from the bully algorithm to quorum voting, zookeeper leader…
Paxos Explained: The Algorithm Behind Most Consensus Systems
The Paxos algorithm explained: the paxos roles (proposers, acceptors, and learners) how prepare and accept ballots run, the…
Raft Explained: Leader Election, Log Replication, and Safety
The Raft consensus algorithm explained: raft leader election with randomized timeouts, raft log replication through a strong leader,…
Consensus Algorithms Compared: Paxos, Raft, ZAB, and PBFT
Consensus algorithms compared: Paxos and Multi-Paxos, the raft vs paxos difference, ZAB inside ZooKeeper, and byzantine fault tolerant…
Distributed Consensus: Why Agreement Is Hard
Distributed consensus explained: the consensus problem, why agreement is hard under partial failure, the quorum math behind majority…
CAP Theorem in Distributed Systems
Distributed systems are the backbone of modern technology, enabling everything from social media platforms to financial services. Yet,…
