Distributed Systems

A request fans out across 50 services and comes back slow. Every dashboard is green. Tracing is how we find out where the time actually went.

At-least-once, at-most-once, exactly-once. What do these actually mean, and which one do you really have?

One database isn't enough. Here's how to split your data without the pain.

Why two-phase commit fails in production, and how sagas use compensating transactions to build reliable cross-service workflows without distributed locking.

Event sourcing is cool, until it isn't. Store events, not state but only when it makes sense.

Locking across machines is harder than you think

Fast producers + slow consumers = cascading failure

Your downstream service will fail. Not might - will. Learn how to tackle these partitions in production.

Distributed agreement is fundamentally hard. Here’s how Raft actually works

Everyone quotes CAP theorem, but no one really understands it.

“Just retry” only works if your operation is idempotent

Wrong timeout settings cause more outages than bugs