Distributed Systems System Designs
Worked Distributed Systems system design walkthroughs: the requirements, the trade-offs, real numbers and the component choices behind each design.
Circuit Breakers, Retries, Timeouts, and Bulkheads
Four complementary resilience patterns that prevent cascading failures in distributed systems. Learn when to apply each, how to tune them, and the trade-offs involved.
Distributed Systems · intermediate · 12 min read
Consensus Algorithms: Paxos, Raft and Leader Election
A deep dive into how distributed systems agree on a single value despite failures, covering Paxos, Raft, and the leader election mechanisms that underpin databases like etcd, CockroachDB, and Kafka.
Distributed Systems · advanced · 12 min read
Disaster Recovery: RPO, RTO, Backups and Multi-Region Strategies
A deep-dive into disaster recovery architecture covering RPO/RTO targets, backup pipelines, replication topologies, and multi-region failover for production systems.
Distributed Systems · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Locking: Redis Redlock, ZooKeeper, etcd and Fencing Tokens
A deep dive into distributed locking algorithms, their failure modes, and how fencing tokens prevent split-brain data corruption in real production systems.
Distributed Systems · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Tracing, Logging, and Observability
A deep-dive into building a production-grade observability stack covering distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics collection across microservices at scale.
Distributed Systems · intermediate · 12 min read
Distributed Unique ID Generator (Snowflake)
Design a high-throughput, time-sortable 64-bit ID generator used by systems like Twitter, Discord, and Instagram to replace auto-increment at distributed scale.
Distributed Systems · intermediate · 12 min read
Gossip Protocols for Membership and Failure Detection
How distributed systems like Cassandra, Consul, and Serf use epidemic-style gossip to maintain cluster membership, detect failures, and propagate state without a single point of coordination.
Distributed Systems · advanced · 12 min read
Service Discovery: Client-Side vs Server-Side, Registries and DNS-Based Discovery
A deep dive into how distributed services find each other at runtime—covering client-side and server-side patterns, service registries, and DNS-based approaches with real trade-offs.
Distributed Systems · intermediate · 12 min read
Serving Data from Multiple Data Centers and Regions
A deep-dive into geo-distributed data serving: replication topologies, consistency models, routing strategies, and failure handling across regions.
Distributed Systems · advanced · 12 min read