Iceberg Catalogs: Polaris vs Nessie vs Unity Comparison (2026)
Iceberg Catalogs: Polaris vs Nessie vs Unity Comparison (2026) - updated October 2026 with verified facts, diagrams and FAQ.
Idempotent API Design: The Complete Engineering Guide
Idempotent API Design: The Complete Engineering Guide - updated October 2026 with verified facts, diagrams and FAQ.
MVCC and Transaction Isolation Levels: Snapshot Isolation, Write Skew and SSI (2026)
Transaction Isolation Levels: MVCC, Snapshot Isolation, Write Skew and SSI (2026) Two doctors are on call tonight. Each opens the scheduling app, sees that two doctors are on call, and…
Load Balancing Algorithms: Power of Two Choices, Maglev and L4 vs L7 (2026)
Load Balancing Algorithms: Power of Two Choices, Maglev and L4 vs L7 (2026) Most teams pick a load balancing algorithm once, usually the default, and never look at it again.…
Probabilistic Data Structures: Bloom Filters, HyperLogLog, Count-Min Sketch and Cuckoo Filters (2026)
Probabilistic Data Structures: Bloom Filters, HyperLogLog, Count-Min Sketch and Cuckoo Filters (2026) Counting the unique visitors of a large site exactly needs a set that holds every visitor ID. At…
Retries, Backoff with Jitter, Circuit Breakers and Retry Budgets: Resilience Patterns (2026)
Circuit Breaker Pattern, Retries, Backoff with Jitter and Retry Budgets: Resilience Patterns (2026) Retries feel like free reliability. A call fails, you try again, and the user never notices. Then…
Database Sharding Strategies: Consistent Hashing, Rendezvous Hashing and Online Resharding (2026)
Database Sharding Strategies: Consistent Hashing, Rendezvous Hashing and Online Resharding (2026) Every sharded system makes one decision on day one that it will spend years paying for: how a key…
Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics: Idempotent Producers, Transactions and Their Limits (2026)
Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics: Idempotent Producers, Transactions and Their Limits (2026) "Exactly once" is the most abused phrase in distributed systems. In a lossy network, a sender that does not hear…
Raft vs Paxos: Leader Election, Log Replication and Consensus Failure Modes (2026)
Raft Consensus vs Paxos: Leader Election, Log Replication and Failure Modes (2026) Every Kubernetes cluster you have ever run depends on a handful of small processes agreeing, thousands of times…
LSM-Trees and RocksDB: Compaction, Write Amplification and Tuning (2026)
LSM Tree Internals: RocksDB Compaction, Write Amplification and Tuning (2026) Most engineers meet the LSM tree the hard way: a service that ran smoothly for months suddenly shows a p99…