A downstream service started timing out. So we did what seemed like the responsible thing. We added retries. The thinking was straightforward. If a request fails because of a temporary network problem or a momentary downstream slowdown, try again. The…
We had a performance problem. So we did what seemed like the obvious thing. We added more application capacity. The system got slower. At first, the numbers didn’t make sense. The system was serving traffic across multiple regions, and workload…
A payment system can be healthy in almost every traditional sense. CPU utilization looks reasonable. The database is responding normally. Kafka is processing messages. Network latency is within limits. There are no obvious application errors. And yet payment latency suddenly…
One of the most interesting architecture decisions I worked through was not about choosing between two technologies. It was about deciding how much architecture we actually needed. We had a large Java/Spring application that had been running for several years.…
