Distributed Systems
Sharding, replication, CAP, consensus, distributed coordination, and how Kubernetes orchestrates the lot.
Core Concepts
Distributed Systems Overview
7 min →How simple systems become distributed systems whether you planned for it or not. The fallacies, the new problem categories, and the modern toolkit that makes it manageable.
Sharding and Replication
9 min →The two foundational techniques for scaling distributed data — and how they combine. Single-leader, multi-leader, leaderless. Sharding strategies and the trade-offs.
CAP Theorem and Practical Implications
8 min →The fundamental trade-off — and the more useful PACELC refinement. CP vs AP, what consistency actually means, and when the trade-off matters in practice.
Partitioning and Replication Strategies
9 min →How different database families scale — relational, document, wide-column, key-value. The architectures, the strengths, and how to pick.
Coordination & Infrastructure
Distributed Consensus
9 min →How distributed systems agree without a coordinator. Paxos, Raft, ZAB, and PBFT — the algorithms that power leader election, replicated logs, and atomic broadcast.
Distributed Coordination and Locking
9 min →Mutual exclusion across machines that don't share memory. The pitfalls, the safe patterns, and the trade-offs of Redis, Redlock, ZooKeeper, and etcd locks.
AWS Resource Hierarchy
9 min →A working tour of how AWS services compose — Organizations, accounts, regions, AZs, compute, storage, security. The mental model for navigating the platform.
Data Architecture, Pipelines, and ETL
10 min →The data lifecycle in modern SaaS — ingestion, storage, processing, security, ML. Lakes, warehouses, lakehouses, and the pipelines that connect them.
Kubernetes & Orchestration
Kubernetes Deep Dive
11 min →How Kubernetes actually works under the hood. Control plane, data plane, the reconciliation loop, scheduling, and the distributed-systems patterns that make it tick.
Kubernetes Resource Hierarchy
9 min →A working tour of the Kubernetes object model — what each resource type is for, how they compose, and the patterns you'll see in production.
Kubernetes Networking
10 min →How packets actually flow in a Kubernetes cluster — pod networking, services, ingress, CNI plugins, and the distributed-systems patterns underneath.