Notes from distributed systems in production.
Essays and field reports from building and operating high-traffic, polyglot platforms — Kubernetes, AWS, incident response, iGaming scale.
Background Jobs: Idempotency, Retries, and DLQs
Async job queues are the silent backbone of production. Get them wrong and you ship duplicate operations, lost messages, and data inconsistency. Three patterns that have kept us safe in production.
Scaling WebSockets: Connections, State, Broadcast
Scaling an HTTP API to tens of thousands of users is relatively easy. Managing the same load over WebSocket connections is a different game. Four years of multiplayer production.
10,000+ CCU: Managing Traffic Waves on Kubernetes
Practical notes on running a multiplayer backend with 10,000+ concurrent users on Kubernetes — autoscaling on custom metrics, pre-warming, priorities, and surviving sudden traffic spikes.
Redis Pub/Sub or RabbitMQ? When to Pick Which
I've run both in the same platform for years. Why each got chosen, when I paid the cost of a wrong call, and the four questions I ask before picking.
Istio Service Mesh in Practice: What It Does and Doesn't
We brought Istio into production during our 2023 Kubernetes migration. A year in, here's what actually delivers value versus what's sold but we don't use — a field report.
Production Incidents: The First 15 Minutes Matter Most
How the first 15 minutes of a production incident play out determines the next few hours. A field playbook from years of iGaming on-call — what to do, what not to do, which tools to reach for.
Polyglot Architecture: Java, .NET, and Python on One Platform
Our production platform has 20+ microservices — some Java/Spring, some .NET Core, some Python. Can multiple languages live next to each other cleanly? When is it necessary, when is it regret?
Observability Basics: Logs, Metrics, Traces — What's Each For?
The three pillars of observability: log, metric, trace. When to reach for which, the trouble with using one in place of another, and real incident examples showing how they work together.
MySQL + MongoDB Together: The Real Cost of Polyglot Persistence
In our game platform, MySQL and MongoDB run side by side. The advantages of using both, the costs that sneak up on you, and four questions to ask before that decision.