Scalability
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How YouTube, Slack and GitHub Shard MySQL: We Built the Vitess Pattern on Five Servers and Measured What It Costs
YouTube built Vitess, and Slack and GitHub use it for their largest MySQL workloads. We built the same primitives over five real MySQL servers and measured them: a scatter read took 4 shard queries and got a quarter of the throughput, every simulated half-finished cross-shard transfer lost money, an online split lost no rows, and a hot channel stayed hot at 128 shards.
How Shopify Survives Black Friday: The Flash-Sale Playbook
Shopify load tests at 150% of last year's peak, queues buyers at the edge and reserves stock during payment. We rebuilt checkout with k6 and measured it.
Six System Design Problems, and the New Problem Each Fix Creates
Caching, read replicas, sharding, queues, WebSockets, retries, circuit breakers and CQRS each solve a real problem and hand you a new one. A practical map of the six problems every growing system meets, the usual fixes, and what each fix costs you.
How Netflix Ships a Third of the Internet: The CDN They Had to Build
At its 2015 peak Netflix was 37% of North American downstream traffic, and almost none of it came from a commercial CDN. Open Connect is a cache hierarchy built on one asymmetry: Netflix knows tonight what people will watch tomorrow. Here is how the appliances, the nightly fill, the BGP steering and the 800 Gb/s FreeBSD boxes fit together, a runnable comparison of push fill against pull-through caching, and what it teaches anyone running a cache.
WebSockets Are the Easy Part
Opening a WebSocket takes twenty lines. Reconnection, resume-from-cursor, presence, fan-out and backpressure are the actual product, and they are why realtime systems fail in month two instead of day one. Here is each problem, what it looks like in production, and an honest build-vs-buy section.