39 long-form articles on production engineering — how real systems fail, why, and what actually fixed them.
9 articles matching “Redis”
Architecture Decisions18 min read
Everyone can define read-your-writes consistency; far fewer can implement it on a master/replica cluster without melting the master.
Architecture Decisions20 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of the whole cache stack: CPU L1/L2/L3, TLB, OS page cache, DB buffer pool, in-process LRU (Caffeine), distributed cache (Redis/Memcached), HTTP cache + ETags, CDN edge, browser, DNS, reverse proxies, query plan cache.
Picking the Right DB15 min read
A senior-engineer walkthrough of how Redis really handles TTLs. Why TTL=0 doesn't free memory. The two strategies — lazy (on-access) and active (the random-sample-and-25%-threshold sampler).
Architecture Decisions20 min read
Every process you run will be told to stop — the only question is whether it gets a request it can act on or a bullet it never sees coming.
Production Incidents28 min read
A timeout is not a failure. Ten real ways idempotency keys break in payment systems — lost gateway responses, two tabs, racing retries, Redis evictions, expired keys, duplicate webhooks — with the fix for each, ten…
Observability16 min read
The bell curve taught you the average is a fair summary and outliers are rare. In software both halves are false: latencies, key popularity, file sizes and follower counts are heavy-tailed power laws where the outliers…
Architecture Decisions18 min read
Most engineers think a leader election "picks the best node." It doesn't — it gets every node to agree on the same node, and agreement under failure is consensus.
Production Incidents25 min read
Why “our queue guarantees exactly-once” is almost always a lie once your flow crosses a component boundary: Kafka EOS scope, ack-after-process, unique constraints, SQS FIFO, DB transactions with SMTP, retries without…
Architecture Decisions20 min read
SVG-backed walkthrough: ring hotspots, successor overload when a node dies, and two ring generations during deploy.