Backend
Replication Lag: The Hidden Cost of Read Replicas
Why read replicas introduce stale reads, how replication lag breaks consistency assumptions, and practical patterns to handle it safely.
·4 min read
Tags
Reliability
20 articles · Page 1 of 2
Backend
Idempotent Background Jobs: Retries, Locks, Exactly-Once
Exactly-once processing does not exist in distributed systems — here is how to design background jobs that survive retries, crashes and duplicate deliveries.
·5 min read
Backend
Idempotency Keys in Practice: Making Retries Safe
How to design and implement idempotency keys so retried requests never double-charge, double-send, or double-create resources.
·5 min read
Backend
Durable Execution: Workflows That Survive Restarts
Why job queues and database state machines break on complex multi-step processes, and how durable execution with Temporal survives crashes and deployments.
·5 min read
Architecture
The Transactional Outbox Pattern: Solving Dual-Write
How the transactional outbox pattern eliminates the dual-write problem and guarantees reliable event publishing without coupling database to broker.
·5 min read
Backend
Graceful Shutdown in Node.js Production Services
Most Node.js services silently drop in-flight requests on every deploy. How to handle SIGTERM correctly, drain connections and exit cleanly in Kubernetes.
·5 min read
DevOps
Kubernetes Probes: Liveness, Readiness and Startup
Configure Kubernetes liveness, readiness and startup probes correctly to prevent cascading failures, avoid restart loops and route traffic only when ready.
·4 min read
Engineering
Testing Distributed Systems: Chaos, Contracts, Confidence
Practical testing for distributed architectures: contract testing between services, chaos engineering, integration design, and confidence without full E2E.
·4 min read
Engineering
Incident Management: From Detection to Post-Mortem
A systematic approach to incident management: alerting design, severity classification, on-call workflows, communication protocols and blameless post-mortems.
·5 min read
Engineering
Fault-Tolerant Systems with Graceful Degradation
Fault tolerance engineering in practice: circuit breakers, bulkheads, fallback chains and degradation strategies that keep systems useful when parts fail.
·5 min read
Engineering
Chaos Engineering: Breaking Things on Purpose
Practice chaos engineering by injecting controlled failures into production to find weaknesses first: network partitions, resource exhaustion, dependencies.
·5 min read
Backend
Designing Idempotent APIs: Safely Retrying Failed Requests
Build idempotent API endpoints that retry safely using idempotency keys, database constraints and state machines — payments, orders and webhooks.
·4 min read