Backend
Database Sharding Strategies and Trade-Offs
A practical guide to database sharding — covering partitioning strategies, shard key selection, cross-shard queries, and the operational complexity that comes with distributing data.
·5 min read
Tags
Architecture
41 articles · Page 3 of 4
Architecture
Understanding Consensus Algorithms in Distributed Systems
A practical guide to consensus algorithms — covering Raft, Paxos, and leader election patterns with real-world examples of when and why distributed systems need them.
·4 min read
Architecture
Event Sourcing in Practice: Patterns and Pitfalls
A practical guide to event sourcing — when to use it, how to implement event stores, build projections, handle schema evolution, and avoid common pitfalls.
·4 min read
Architecture
API Gateway Patterns for Microservices
How API gateways handle routing, authentication, rate limiting, and response aggregation — with patterns for building or choosing the right gateway for your architecture.
·5 min read
Architecture
Understanding Concurrency Models: Threads, Async, and Actors
A comparison of threading, async/await, and actor-based concurrency models — when each fits, their tradeoffs, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
·5 min read
Architecture
Designing Resilient Distributed Systems with Timeouts and Retries
How to implement timeouts, retries, and backoff strategies that prevent cascading failures in distributed architectures.
·4 min read
Architecture
CQRS Pattern: Separating Reads from Writes
Command Query Responsibility Segregation uses different models for reading and writing data — here's when it solves real problems and when it's unnecessary complexity.
·4 min read
Architecture
Domain-Driven Design: Essential Building Blocks
Entities, value objects, aggregates, and bounded contexts — the DDD patterns that keep complex business logic organized without over-engineering simple systems.
·3 min read
Architecture
Event-Driven Architecture: Patterns and Pitfalls
Event-driven systems decouple producers from consumers through asynchronous message passing — but eventual consistency, ordering guarantees, and idempotency introduce real complexity.
·3 min read
Architecture
Message Queues in Practice
RabbitMQ, Redis Streams, or Kafka — understanding the messaging patterns behind decoupled, resilient systems and when each tool fits.
·3 min read
Architecture
Background Job Processing Patterns
Not everything belongs in the request-response cycle — queues, workers, retries, and dead letter patterns for reliable background processing.
·3 min read
Engineering
Feature Flags at Scale
Feature flags decouple deployment from release — here's how to implement them without creating a tangled mess of conditional logic across your codebase.
·3 min read