Idempotency: Designing Operations That Survive Retries
Idempotency explained: operations that survive retries and duplicates, the idempotency key from client to dedup table, idempotent API…
Tag
system-design
58 articles
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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…
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Distributed Locks: Mutual Exclusion Across Machines
Distributed locks explained: leases and TTLs as mutual exclusion across machines; the Redis distributed lock and its failover…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Distributed Consensus: Why Agreement Is Hard
Distributed consensus explained: the consensus problem, why agreement is hard under partial failure, the quorum math behind majority…
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Consistent Hashing: How Distributed Systems Place Data
Consistent hashing explained: the hash ring, virtual nodes, and the rendezvous hashing alternative; the placement scheme that lets…
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What Is a Distributed System? Partial Failure, Clocks, and the Fallacies
What makes a system distributed: several machines cooperating over a network, partial failure as the defining property, no…
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Elasticsearch Architecture: Inverted Indexes, Shards, and Near-Real-Time Search
Elasticsearch architecture from the inside: the inverted index and its term dictionary, segments and the near-real-time refresh, shards…
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Data Partitioning: Vertical, Horizontal, and the Sharding Question
Data partitioning explained: the umbrella concept under sharding, horizontal vs vertical partitioning, the partitioning vs sharding vocabulary sorted,…