Retry Storms: How Good Clients Take Down Healthy Servers

A retry looks harmless: the request failed, so try again. Multiply that by every client, add one slow dependency, and retries turn into a self-inflicted DDoS. This walks from the naive retry loop to exponential backoff, jitter, retry budgets and circuit breakers, the caller-side half of resilience that pairs with rate limiting on the server.

Why Redis Rate Limiting Breaks at Scale (and What Uber Does Instead)

A token bucket in memory is trivial. Put it behind Redis and it works, until it doesn't. This walks through rate limiting from one node, to a shared Redis, to why that model collapses at millions of requests per second, and the shift Uber made: enforce locally, coordinate globally, and drop by probability.

Setting Up a PostgreSQL HA Cluster with Patroni and etcd

How to build a PostgreSQL high-availability cluster with automatic failover using Patroni, etcd, HAProxy and Keepalived. Learn the architecture, prerequisites, and step-by-step deployment so any node failure is handled with zero app changes.

Why I built my own MongoDB image to run a replica set in production

A field report: deploying a 3-node MongoDB replica set with Docker, and why baking the config into a custom image instead of mounting volumes makes deployments reproducible across environments that don't look alike.