Request Hedging Tail Latency: Cutting p99 Without Overload
Learn how hedged requests cut p99 tail latency in microservices: delay tuning, hedge budgets, cancellation, idempotency, routing, and when to avoid it.
13 min read
Category
Microservices
Service boundaries, communication, data ownership and the operational reality of distributed systems.
Dead Letter Queue in Microservices: Handling Poison Messages
Learn how to design a dead letter queue in microservices: classify poison messages, bound message retry, enrich failures, and run safe DLQ replay with owners.
13 min read
Debezium PostgreSQL CDC: Slots, Snapshots and Safe Consumers
Set up Debezium PostgreSQL CDC on Kafka Connect: logical replication slots, snapshots, event envelopes, idempotent consumers and WAL-safe operations.
13 min read
Backward Compatible API Changes for Independently Deployed Services
A checklist for backward compatible API changes: safe vs breaking changes, tolerant readers, expand-and-contract, enums, Protobuf and event rules, and CI checks.
18 min read
Outbox Relay Lag: Measuring and Tuning Each Stage of Event Delay
Break outbox relay lag into commit, capture, publish and consume segments, measure each one, monitor CDC pipelines, and tune the stage that breaks your budget.
17 min read
Inbox Pattern in Microservices: Deduplicating Incoming Events
Build an inbox pattern for idempotent consumers: choose dedup keys, design a processed messages table, handle concurrency, retention, testing and trade-offs.
13 min read
Local Development for Microservices: Compose, Stubs and Previews
A tiered approach to local development for microservices: Docker Compose for what you change, WireMock stubs for the rest and ephemeral previews.
13 min read
Do I Need a Service Mesh? Istio vs Linkerd and When They Pay Off
Learn what a service mesh does, when mTLS, traffic control and observability justify it, how Istio, Linkerd and ambient mesh compare, and how to adopt safely.
15 min read
Kafka Exactly Once Semantics: Idempotent Producers and Transactions
How Kafka exactly once semantics works: idempotent producers, transactions, zombie fencing, read_committed consumers, and where the guarantee stops.
13 min read
Event Ordering in Distributed Systems: Beyond Wall-Clock Time
Learn why clock skew breaks timestamp ordering and how to pick per-key sequence numbers, logical clocks, or a sequencer for each workflow's ordering needs.
14 min read
Service to Service Authentication: mTLS, JWTs and Token Exchange
Why service to service authentication needs both workload and user identity, and how mTLS, JWT propagation and OAuth token exchange fit into one layered design.
13 min read
Shared Libraries in Microservices: Versioning Without Lockstep
How to scope, version, deprecate and support shared libraries across microservices so each service upgrades on its own schedule while drift stays bounded.
14 min read