System Design & AI Infra

Tuan Hiep TRAN

I write about the engineering judgment behind high-load, correctness-critical systems: invariants, trade-offs, failure modes, and the operational constraints that shape real architecture.

Architecture Judgment

Design notes for systems where correctness, latency, scale, and cost collide.

System Design Bricks

Reusable mental models for order books, payment flows, ledgers, and traffic control.

Failure-Aware Thinking

Design reviews that ask what breaks, where pressure accumulates, and what must remain invariant.

What This Blog Is

This is not a tutorial archive. It is a field notebook for backend architecture, distributed systems, and AI infrastructure from a practitioner's lens.

The main themes are distributed systems under load, financial correctness and reconciliation, traffic shaping, backpressure, admission control, low-latency architecture, and production-oriented design reviews.

โšœ๏ธ Invariants first ๐ŸŒ Interfaces matter ๐Ÿ’  Trade-offs over slogans ๐ŸŒ€ Feedback closes the design