We had a performance problem. One of the most frequently accessed pieces of data was being read far more often than it changed. The database was handling a large number of repeated reads. The obvious solution was caching. We introduced…
We had a performance problem. One part of the application was doing too much work during a synchronous request. The obvious solution was to move the work out of the request path. Instead of: we changed the flow to: The…
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…
An experience-informed composite of patterns that emerge in complex engineering environments. The strange thing about bad architecture is that it rarely begins with a stupid decision. It usually begins with a reasonable decision. The engineers are experienced. The design looks clean.…
