Shopify
Shopify's Modular Monolith and Pods: Surviving Flash Sales
How Shopify stayed on a modular Rails monolith and isolated flash-sale blast radius with pod-based sharding instead of splitting into microservices.
3 min read
Tag
Scalability
8 articles
System Design
Database Sharding Strategies That Survive Growth
Hash-based, range-based, and directory-based shard keys compared, and why resharding is the expensive part nobody plans for early.
2 min read
Databases
Time-Series Databases: When to Reach for One
When a time-series database earns its place over a general-purpose one, and what you give up in exchange for the speed it buys you.
3 min read
System Design
Load Balancing Strategies: L4 vs. L7
Transport-layer and application-layer load balancers make routing decisions with very different visibility — here's what each one trades off.
2 min read
System Design
Consistent Hashing, Explained From First Principles
How consistent hashing limits data movement when nodes join or leave, and why virtual nodes are what makes it actually balanced.
2 min read
System Design
CQRS Without the Ceremony
CQRS doesn't require event sourcing or a second database — a minimal, practical version of the pattern and when to reach for more.
2 min read
System Design
Rate Limiting Algorithms: Token Bucket, Sliding Window, and What Actually Fits
Fixed window, sliding window, token bucket, and leaky bucket rate limiters compared, with the burst and fairness trade-offs each one hides.
3 min read
Databases
Table Partitioning Strategies That Actually Pay Off
A comparison of range, list, and hash partitioning strategies, when each one earns its operational complexity, and when it's premature.
3 min read