Global Flash Sale Engine (4/4): Core Payment Integration & Distributed Idempotency

Finalizing the checkout flow. We resolve the ultimate distributed transaction nightmare: The Sweeper cancels an expired order, but Stripe reports a successful charge due to network latency. Utilizing the Saga Pattern, Idempotency Lifecycles, and Compensating Transactions.

May 25, 2026 · 15 min · Hiep

Global Flash Sale Engine (3/4): Distributed Inventory & The Hot-Row Problem

How to prevent overselling when thousands of admitted users compete for the same SKU. We shift from a naive atomic counter to a bounded-consistency reservation lifecycle using Redis Lua, inventory sharding, and transactional reconciliation.

May 16, 2026 · 15 min · Hiep

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.

April 11, 2026 · 6 min · Hiep

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.

April 3, 2026 · 8 min · Hiep

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.

March 29, 2026 · 5 min · Hiep

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.

February 22, 2026 · 7 min · Hiep

Welcome to My Blog — System Design & AI Infrastructure

A personal space to explore system design, AI infrastructure, and deep reflections on the world of technology.

August 29, 2025 · 1 min · Hiep