Deep dives into system design, cloud architecture, and distributed systems.
26 articles • Page 1 of 3
No leader. No followers. Any node can accept any write. Amazon's Dynamo pioneered this radical approach, and it powers some of the world's largest systems. But without a leader, how do you know what the 'true' value is?
Your users are in Tokyo, London, and New York. A single leader means trans-Pacific latency on every write. Multi-leader replication solves this... but introduces the nightmare of write conflicts.
You update your profile photo, refresh the page... and your old photo stares back at you. You post a comment, scroll down... and it vanishes. Welcome to replication lag.
Your primary database just crashed. Users are screaming on Twitter. Revenue is bleeding at $10,000 per minute. But wait—within 30 seconds, a backup seamlessly takes over. That's the magic of replication.
RPC demands an immediate response. Databases store data indefinitely. But what if you want the best of both worlds? Message passing gives you the low latency of RPC with the durability and decoupling of databases.
For decades, developers have dreamed of making network calls as simple as local function calls. This dream has a name: location transparency. And it's a beautiful lie that has caused countless production outages.
You've learned how to encode data efficiently—JSON, Protobuf, Avro. But encoding is only half the story. The real question is: how does that encoded data flow between processes? And here's the twist: when you write to a database, you're essentially sending a message to your future self.
Discover how Avro eliminates field tags entirely, enabling dynamic schema generation for data pipelines. Learn why writer and reader can use different schemas—and how this powers the Hadoop ecosystem.
Discover how Google and Facebook eliminated field names from their encoding formats, achieving 60% smaller payloads than JSON while enabling safe schema evolution for billions of requests per day.
JSON looks so simple—until Twitter discovers JavaScript can't handle their tweet IDs. Learn the four hidden problems with universal formats and when to use binary alternatives like MessagePack.