Distributed Systems
8 articles on Distributed Systems.
Designing Async, Long-Running APIs for AI Agents
AI agents kick off tasks that run for minutes — synchronous request/response breaks down fast. A practical guide to the async job pattern: 202 + status URLs, polling vs webhooks vs streaming, durable queues, and idempotent resumption.
May 30, 2026·6 min readBuilding Backends for AI Agents: Idempotency, Retries & State (2026)
AI agents retry, run for minutes, and call your APIs in unpredictable loops. The backend is where agent reliability lives. A practical guide to idempotency, safe retries, durable state, and observability for agent-facing systems in 2026.
May 22, 2026·7 min readIdempotency Keys: How We Stopped Double-Charging Customers
A retry on a slow payment request charged a customer twice. A practical guide to idempotency keys — how to design the key, store it atomically, handle in-flight duplicates, and make any unsafe POST safe to retry.
March 18, 2026·6 min readWhen Our Kafka Consumer Lag Hit 2 Million: A Debugging War Story
Our order events fell 2 million messages behind and nobody noticed for hours. A practical walkthrough of diagnosing Kafka consumer lag — partitions, rebalances, poison messages — and the fixes that got us back to real time.
February 20, 2026·6 min readDatabase Sharding & Partitioning: Complete Advanced Guide for Scale
Master horizontal scaling with database sharding and partitioning strategies. Learn consistent hashing, shard key selection, rebalancing, and PostgreSQL partitioning for billion-row tables.
December 19, 2025·11 min readMessage Queues: RabbitMQ vs Redis Streams vs Kafka - Complete Comparison
Deep comparison of RabbitMQ, Redis Streams, and Apache Kafka for message queuing. Performance benchmarks, use cases, and production patterns for choosing the right message broker.
December 19, 2025·11 min readApache Kafka Deep Dive: Event Streaming at Scale
Comprehensive guide to Apache Kafka covering architecture, producers, consumers, Kafka Streams, and production best practices for building event-driven systems.
December 18, 2024·7 min readEvent-Driven Architecture with Apache Kafka: A Practical Guide
Learn how to design and implement event-driven systems using Apache Kafka. Covers event schemas, consumer patterns, exactly-once semantics, and real-world patterns from healthcare data pipelines.
December 5, 2024·6 min read