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 […]
Kubernetes is an open‑source platform that automatically runs, scales, and heals containerized applications across a cluster of machines. 1. What Kubernetes is and why its components are used together Kubernetes is a container orchestration system. Containers package your app and its dependencies. Kubernetes makes sure those containers run reliably on a group of machines called […]
Web services communication protocols are the standardized methods through which distributed applications exchange data over networks, defining how services send requests, receive responses, and handle real-time or asynchronous interactions. What This Is and Why These Components Work Together Web services need a common language to talk across the internet. Without protocols, a Java service on […]
The 7-Layer OSI Model is a conceptual framework that organizes how computer networks communicate, splitting the process into seven distinct layers, each responsible for a specific aspect of data transmission—from raw electrical signals to user applications. What This Model Is and Why It Matters The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model is not a protocol or […]
The Saga pattern is one of those ideas that sounds intimidating until you realize it’s basically a grown-up way of saying: “When a long process has many steps, and one step fails, don’t panic—undo the earlier steps carefully.” Picture a classic problem in distributed systems. You have multiple services, each with its own database. There […]
A Kubernetes Ingress is a Kubernetes-managed way to route external HTTP/HTTPS traffic to the right Services inside a cluster using hostnames and URL paths. 1) What this combination is and why the components are used together Ingress is not a single component—it’s a pattern made of a few pieces that work together: They’re used together […]
A Helm chart is a packaged, reusable way to define, install, and upgrade an application on Kubernetes. 1) What this is and why the components are used together Kubernetes is great at running containers, but it expects you to provide many related objects—deployments, services, ingress rules, config, secrets references, autoscaling settings, and more. Managing those […]
My Notes 