tag

Systems

  1. #43 3 min

    Designed to Fail

    When it comes to reliability engineering, people often talk about things like fault injection, monitoring, and operations runbooks. These are all critical pieces for building systems which can withstand failure, but what’s less talked about is the need to design systems which deliberately fail. Reliability design has a natural progression which closely follows that of architectural design. With monolithic systems, we care more about preventing failure from occurring. With service-oriented architectures, controlling failure becomes less manageable, so instead we learn to anticipate it. With highly distributed microservice architectures where failure is all but guaranteed, we embrace it.

  2. #22 12 min

    Dissecting Message Queues

    Disclaimer (10/29/20) – The benchmarks and performance analysis presented in this post should not be relied on. This post was written roughly six years ago, and at the time, was just the result of my exploration of various messaging systems. The benchmarks are not implemented in a meaningful way, which I discussed in a follow-up post. This post will remain for posterity and learning purposes, but I do not claim that this information is accurate or useful.