1. What is Capacity Planning? Capacity planning is the discipline of answering one question in a systematic way: “Given how the business expects customers to use the site, what amount of compute, database, cache, network, and storage do we need so the system remains fast and reliable, even during peaks and failures?” Conceptually, it is […]
Networking protocols are standardized rules that let applications communicate reliably and securely over the internet by organizing how data travels, where it goes, and what path it takes. What This Combination Is and Why These Protocols Matter When you build backend systems, data must move between servers, clients, and services. Without protocols, every engineer would […]
Big Picture Overview Before a single server can handle all your traffic, you face a fundamental problem: as your application grows, requests pour in from thousands of users simultaneously. A single server—no matter how powerful—has limits. It can only accept a finite number of connections, process a finite number of requests per second, and store […]
Big Picture Overview Imagine you’re trying to visit amazon.com, but computers don’t understand English. They only speak IP addresses—long numbers like 205.251.242.103. Someone needs to translate the human-friendly name (amazon.com) into the machine-friendly address. That’s the Domain Name System (DNS). Without DNS, you’d need to memorize thousands of IP addresses. The internet would be unusable. […]
Introduction Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that powers some of the world’s most demanding applications. As a Java/e-commerce engineer, understanding DynamoDB concepts is crucial for building scalable systems. This guide breaks down essential DynamoDB terminologies using real-world examples you can relate to. 1. Table Definition: A collection of data records, similar […]
Target Audience: Software engineers with Java + AWS background Table of Contents Foundations What Observability Really Means Observability vs. Monitoring: The Critical Distinction The two terms are often used interchangeably but serve fundamentally different purposes. Understanding this distinction is essential for Tech Lead credibility. Monitoring answers the question: “What is wrong?” It uses predefined metrics, […]
Executive Context: Why This Matters As an architect, you’re no longer optimizing a single service—you’re designing systems that serve millions while minimizing cost and maximizing reliability. Capacity calculation is where business requirements meet technical constraints. Get it wrong, and you either waste millions on infrastructure or your system crashes during peak traffic. This is not […]
An API Gateway is a reverse proxy that manages and routes API requests between clients and backend services. The Big Picture: Where API Gateway Fits Modern applications rarely run as single monolithic programs. They consist of dozens or hundreds of independent services—user management, payments, inventory, recommendations—each with its own API. Without a gateway, clients must […]
Summary Load balancing is the mechanism that prevents any single server from becoming a bottleneck. It distributes incoming requests across multiple backend servers, ensuring no one instance is overwhelmed. Yet choosing how to distribute traffic is not trivial. Two primary architectures exist: Network Load Balancers (Layer 4), which route based on TCP/UDP primitives with microsecond […]
Executive Summary Caching is the most pragmatic tool for managing the fundamental tension in distributed systems: the need for speed and the cost of reaching persistent storage. It transforms a costly database round-trip into a sub-millisecond memory lookup, but only when implemented with clear understanding of trade-offs. This article provides a conceptual framework for senior […]
My Notes 