The Transactional Outbox Pattern
Writing to your database and publishing an event are two operations that can't share a transaction. The outbox pattern fixes that, and when to skip it.
Read the analysisDistributed systems · FAANG-scale engineering
Production wisdom for engineers building at planetary scale.
exashard is a publication on distributed systems, Kubernetes, and the architecture that takes software from one million to one billion users — written from the trenches of running a real polyglot platform, not paraphrased from documentation.
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Kubernetes
Environment Config Overlays for Kubernetes
One config that differs per environment is where drift starts. Base plus overlay keeps dev, staging, and prod honest without duplicating manifests.
Distributed Systems
GDPR Deletion in Event-Driven Systems
Deleting a user across many services is a fan-out problem with a nasty twist: what your deletion event means. Requested or executed changes everything.
Distributed Systems
Kafka Partitions, Retention, and Compaction
Three Kafka settings decide throughput, cost, and whether replay works: partition count, retention, and cleanup policy. How to choose each deliberately.
Distributed Systems
Kafka Topic Naming and Governance
Ad-hoc Kafka topics become an unnavigable mess. A naming convention plus a single canonical registry keeps an event bus legible as it grows past 50 topics.
Engineering Strategy
Alerts That Don't Wake You at 3 AM
Most on-call pain is bad alerts, not bad systems. Alert on symptoms users feel, page only on what needs a human now, and kill the rest. The rules.
Distributed Systems
Structured Logging at Scale
Plain-text logs are ungreppable at scale. Structured logging makes logs queryable, but volume and cost bite back. How to log structured, useful, and affordable.
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