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 vendor tools, and the sampling that makes it…
Tag
system-design
58 articles
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…
Monolith vs Microservices: The Decision, Not the Fashion
Monolith vs microservices decided honestly: the side-by-side comparison on team shapes, scaling, and operational maturity, the modular monolith…
How Kafka Works: Topics, Partitions, and Consumer Groups
How Kafka works from the log out: topics and partitions as the units of order and parallelism, consumer…
Kafka vs RabbitMQ: Choosing a Message Broker
Kafka vs RabbitMQ decided on model shape, not brand: the durable log versus classic routing, when to use…
Circuit Breaker Pattern: States, Failing Fast, and Bulkheads
The circuit breaker pattern: the three circuit breaker states, failing fast with real fallbacks, and the bulkhead pattern…
Service Discovery: Registry, Patterns, and Consul vs etcd
Service discovery: how the service registry tracks who is up, the client-side vs server-side discovery comparison, and the…
Event Driven Architecture: Pub/Sub, Event Sourcing, and Choreography
Event driven architecture: the pub/sub vs message queue comparison, event sourcing as the system of record, and choreography…
Message Queues in System Design: Delivery Guarantees and Dead Letters
Message queues in system design: the at-least-once vs exactly-once delivery comparison, message ordering, and the dead letter queue…
Microservices Architecture: Trade-offs, Boundaries, and When Not to Use Them
Microservices architecture explained: service boundaries and bounded contexts, the microservices trade-offs in both directions, and honest guidance on…