Stripe
Modeling Money Movement: Ledgers, State Machines, and Exactly-Once Effects
How Stripe models money movement with immutable ledger entries and explicit state machines to guarantee correctness even when networks and services fail.
3 min read
Tag
Reliability
14 articles
Google
Error Budgets and Toil: How Google Turned Operations Into an Engineering Discipline
How Google's Site Reliability Engineering practice used error budgets and a hard cap on toil to align reliability work with product velocity.
3 min read
DoorDash
Reliability Engineering for a Three-Sided Marketplace
How DoorDash designs for graceful degradation and load shedding so a spike or partial outage on one side of its marketplace doesn't take down the rest.
3 min read
WhatsApp
The Minimal-Operations Philosophy That Let a Tiny Team Run WhatsApp
WhatsApp famously ran hundreds of millions of users on a strikingly small engineering team by designing operational simplicity into the system itself.
3 min read
Stripe
Rate Limiters and Load Shedders: How Stripe's API Protects Itself
How Stripe layers per-request rate limiting with system-wide load shedding to keep its payments API available when traffic spikes or dependencies slow down.
3 min read
Amazon
Cells and Shuffle Sharding: Amazon's Approach to Containing Blast Radius
How AWS uses cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding to keep one customer's or one partition's failure from taking down everyone else.
3 min read
System Design
The Transactional Outbox Pattern
How the transactional outbox pattern makes updating a database and publishing an event atomic, without a distributed transaction.
2 min read
Software Engineering
Blameless Postmortems That Actually Change Things
Why most postmortems produce a document nobody acts on, and what separates a blameless postmortem process that genuinely prevents repeat incidents.
3 min read
Slack
Inside Slack's Incident Response and Operational Review Culture
How Slack structures incident severity, on-call response, and blameless postmortems to turn outages into durable operational improvements.
3 min read
Shopify
Game Days: How Shopify Rehearses for Its Biggest Traffic Day of the Year
Shopify runs months of scripted load tests and failure drills against production infrastructure to prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday.
3 min read
System Design
Idempotency in Distributed Systems: Making Retries Safe
Idempotency keys, atomic check-and-write, and why PUT being idempotent by spec doesn't make it the right tool for a retried write.
2 min read
Databases
Understanding and Avoiding Database Deadlocks
Why deadlocks happen even in well-designed schemas, how to read a deadlock log, and the lock-ordering habits that prevent them.
3 min read
System Design
The Saga Pattern for Distributed Transactions
Choreography versus orchestration, compensating actions, and the eventual consistency you actually get from the saga pattern.
2 min read
Databases
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Replication: The Real Trade-offs
What synchronous and asynchronous replication actually guarantee during a failover, and why the choice is really about how much data you can lose.
3 min read