Notes from real-world Distributed Systems and AI Infrastructure.
Global Flash Sale Engine (2/4): Admission Control & The Virtual Waiting Room
Auto-scaling alone cannot save you from TCP connection exhaustion. We architect a Virtual Waiting Room using Async Polling with Jitter, Edge Bot Defense, and Cryptographic Tokens to decouple traffic flow from inventory capacity.
Global Flash Sale Engine (1/4): The Thundering Herd - Surviving the First Second
You don’t survive a flash sale by scaling up your database. You survive by ruthlessly shaping and dropping traffic before it reaches your core.
Global Payment Gateway (4/4): Reconciliation & Settlement - The Architecture of Trust
Internal systems do not become correct at the API boundary; they become correct through reconciliation with external truth.
Global Payment Gateway (3/4): The Contended Ledger - Correctness Under Concurrency
Balance is a lie; the journal is the truth. Explore how to architect a high-throughput ledger that preserves financial correctness under extreme concurrency.
Global Payment Gateway (2/4): Distributed Transactions & The Saga Pattern
Why Two-Phase Commit (2PC) fails at scale, and how to architect the Saga Pattern and Transactional Outbox to guarantee data consistency across microservices.
Global Payment Gateway (1/4): The Idempotent Payment API
Exactly-once delivery is an illusion in distributed networks. In this post, we architect an Idempotent Payment API to guarantee financial correctness amidst network timeouts, race conditions, and retry storms.
Stock Exchange Core (4/4): Trade-offs, Scaling Limits & Alternative Architectures
When does the LMAX Disruptor fail? We explore the CAP theorem, quantify the brutal costs of Kernel Bypass, and provide a strict decision framework for system design.
Stock Exchange Core (3/4): High Availability & Deterministic Fault Tolerance
How to survive hardware crashes without a database. We explore Event Sourcing, the Sequencer pattern, and UDP Multicast to achieve 99.999% uptime in a single-threaded architecture.
Stock Exchange Core (2/4): The Single-Threaded Matching Engine
Why multi-threading kills High-Frequency Trading systems. We explore lock-free concurrency, Mechanical Sympathy, and the LMAX Disruptor pattern to achieve sub-microsecond matching.