39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
4 articles matching “Cassandra”
Query Optimization15 min read
We're trained to demand our data structures be correct — so here's one that's wrong on purpose, and runs inside Cassandra, RocksDB, Bigtable, most CDNs, and your browser's malware check.
Picking the Right DB22 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of Log-Structured Merge Trees: MemTable + WAL durability, SSTable layout with sparse index and bloom filters, the L0→Ln level hierarchy, leveled vs tiered vs FIFO compaction, the three…
Architecture Decisions16 min read
"Stamp each write with the current time and keep the latest" feels obvious — and it silently deletes data, because two machines can never agree on what time it is.
Observability10 min read
Every distributed system contains a quiet subsystem that decides which peers are still alive — and "send a ping, no reply, mark it dead" is wrong in a few interesting ways.